Building A Home Library: The Case for Books, Part 1
My living room library is an ongoing labor of love. Upstairs in the hall and bedrooms of our old farm house, bookcases are bulging with over-used (somewhat abused) homeschool curriculum, along with non-evolving histories, honest biographies, legendary, heroic adventures and all other literary facts and fictions that we’ve acquired over the years. These are keepers. My recently renovated living-library holds new finds and noble oldies, books that I’m aiming to dive into.
So why keep the dusty, musty ones already read? Because we’re living in an age of censorship, a renewed and revved up modernized form of iconoclasm. This I-can’t-know-chasm will leave us in a spiritual rut unless we collect and keep the Great Books and our favorite classics. The tried and true are trashed with public library purging. Heavy hitters are replaced by light weight, air-fluffed, trendy reads. Resource materials are becoming more easily found online. In time, the top shelf books may be out of reach, so if you love learning, have a passion for culture and seek to discover authentic truths, it’s important to have a few Greats at your fingertips.
It comes as no surprise that the Latin word for freedom (libertas) and for book (liber) roll off the tongue with the same sound and pour from the heart, promoting the same principle. In libris libertas. In books there is freedom. Good books are liberating.
In his book, How to Keep from Losing Your Mind: Educating Yourself Classically to Survive Cultural Indoctrination, the author, Deal Hudson, emphasizes that a healthy home library will be filled not only with reliable reads, but with admirable art, movies with moving story lines that emphasize the human plight, and enriching, mind stretching, spiritually uplifting music as well. His book is filled with a variety of titles, authors, artists and composers. One good book leads to another, so, check out the “must have” lists – but develop your own collection according to your interests.
Can you have too many books? Is it too materialistic? Over the past decade, minimalism has been on the move. Minimalism is not the same as simply living a simple life. A simple life means cutting the clutter and clinging to the true, the good and the beautiful. It means striving to live by honest ideals, providing for oneself and others, developing practical skills, and discovering one’s own innate abilities. Great books help us live the simple life, broadening our worldview and helping us to become better human beings.
As Tolkien said, “It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” (A profound understatement.)
Having your own tangible copies of timeless books is becoming more and more necessary in a world that is – ironically – being destroyed by liberalistic ideologies bent on eradicating western culture.
Besides, it’s hard to snuggle up with google.
Love liberty.
Find Freedom.
Read. Study. Wonder.
