August 9 is birthdate of my father, H.D. “Doc” Adams, who was born in 1927.
It’s also Book Lover’s Day.
Those two seemingly incongruent circumstances actually have a powerful connection for me.
After suffering a major stroke on February 10, 2012, my father passed away on February 25. By the time I was able to get back to Tennessee to see him, he had lost motor functions and speech capacity. Over the few days I was there, the slow but steady decline continued.
I had last seen him during the Christmas holidays. While there, I spent some time alone at home with him. After suffering a series of strokes over the past several years, he could no longer read – but the legacy of his reading lined the bookshelves all over my boyhood home. In the quiet hours when everyone was asleep, I scanned the shelves and remembered hearing him talk about this book or that one. I pulled a few off the shelf, and opening them, was instantly transported back in time to a conversation about the subject, or to memories of the event itself.
I’ve been a reader of books since, well, before I can remember. My father was an avid reader, and he passed that passion along to me at an early age. Even though he worked 6 days a week, 12 hours a day as a gas station owner, he often spent several hours reading at night. A recent revelation from a book brought his actions sharply into focus:
The manual labor of the past that allowed a human being to work in an embodied way, and to contemplate in heart and mind while working with one’s hands, encouraged the desire for reading after the physical exertions were completed. One can imagine why a farmer might kick off his boots after a day of sweat and dirt to read a good book.
Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson
That was my father.
He insisted my mother take my brother and me to the library in the next town and check out books – every two weeks. I would get the maximum number of books, take them home, and read them – usually in the first day or two. Then it would be an impatient wait till the next library trip.
Reading is a passion I treasure, and one that I am thankful my father instilled in me.
The library habit of my boyhood stuck with me through elementary, junior, and high school; it remained in college and graduate school and post-graduate specialized studies. Each of my vocational roles since school “ended” have included reading as a part of what I brought to the task. It continues to this day, with a weekly visit to my local library to drop off books read and pick up books on hold – usually three or four in each category.
Wednesday August 9 is Book Lover’s Day – not an official holiday but one I eagerly celebrate. Book reading is a great hobby. It’s an important one, too. Employers look for it on resumes. Reading is educational, informative, and relaxing. It makes us both smarter and happier people.
Book Lover’s Day is a great day to celebrate. Just grab an interesting book, find a quiet, cozy place, and crack open the cover. Celebrating Book Lover’s Day in August is pleasurable on the deck, under a shady tree, poolside, or in a cozy hammock. If you fall asleep while reading, that’s okay. It’s all part of the relaxing benefits of being a book lover.
I love (and practice) the 4 different levels of reading as espoused by Mortimer Adler in his great book, How to Read a Book, but I really like to latch onto a topic and practice synoptical reading. Also known as comparative reading, it is where many books are read, and placed in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve.
For many years, an ongoing topic of synoptical reading has been about Walt Disney and the “kingdom” he founded. My current Disney library is over 450 books, dating from 1939 to current releases – and I’m still actively researching the subject, and discovering new authors and books regularly. Here’s a few of my latest acquisitions:
In addition to the pure enjoyment of reading on the subject, these books provide a constant reference for illustrations when I’m writing about hospitality, planning, vision, and other topics that Walt Disney lived out – and to some extent – the Disney organization still practices. With 2023 being the 100th anniversary of the founding of the company, there’s a lot to choose from!
In addition to Disney synoptical reading, I’ve always got small threads of other, diverse, synoptical reading going on, often spurred by long-running interests and subsequent book searches. Here’s a current one, entitled #BurgerQuest: a literary, culinary, and arbitrary journey in pursuit of America’s iconic delight. True to my nature, over the years I’ve built up a research library on the burger; here’s just a sampling of the texts dealing with the history of the hamburger:
As I continue to develop #BurgerQuest, I will be diving into the history of the restaurants who have brought the burger from the lunch wagons of the 1890s to today’s wide range of options.
One of the greatest contributors to my synoptical reading was an Auxano project, 8+ years in the running, that ended in 2021. It involved researching 574 books to produce 227 issues of a book excerpt project. For those of you who are curious, that’s a book stack over five stories high. You can read about it here.
Even with that big change in my reading habit, there’s always a book at hand!
There’s current reading for Auxano social media (Tweets, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts), other internal Auxano writing projects, and believe it or not, reading just for the pleasure of reading – a nightly occurrence.
Currently a few topics I’ve read for pleasure in the past few months include: ongoing research into the concepts of hospitality in the home (what I’ve termed,”First Place Hospitality”); tracking the development of hospitality in the U.S; exploring the idea of the “modern elder”; select works about small town America, both past and present; the friendship of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone and their contribution to America’s development in the early 20th century; and shepherd leadership (biblical concepts relevant for the 21st century).
Of course, there’s always some Disney history coming off the presses that I include in the mix!
So, on Book Lover’s Day, and in memory of my father, I’m trying to emulate Thomas Edison, who believed that voracious reading was the key to self-improvement. He read books on a remarkable range of subjects to address his endless queries.
As Edison noted, “I didn’t read a few books, I read the library.”
If you want to know more about my dad, here is the eulogy I gave at his funeral. After the funeral, while my sons and I were moving some things around his gas station, I discovered one reason I am so passionate about guest experiences. And read this post to find out why readers are leaders.
How are you celebrating Book Lover’s Day?
Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader
During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based, current events.
It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.
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