Scout & Morgan Books

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How to Read a Book (Again)

A lifetime ago, I was enrolled at an unaccredited music school in Kansas City. Focusing on the guitar, I studied songwriting and composition. In the footnotes of one of our assigned readings, I came across a reference to How to Read a Book.

I put down the text, got in my car, and drove straight to the nearby big-chain-bookstore to grab my first copy.

By the time I truly finished reading it, I was back in Minnesota, working as a carpenter. In the back of How to Read a Book is the greatest treasure: a chronological list of great works, beginning with Homer’s Iliad and carrying forward through the centuries—literature, science, philosophy, history. Everything.

At the time I had an iPod—then a Google G1 on release day—and as I worked summer through winter and back again, I found audiobooks and loaded them up and began to make my way through the list.

While my saw carved openings, and my hammer cleaved in doors and windows, my ears were full of Plato, Euclid, The Bard Himself, Darwin, Newton... on and on...

I, of course, began at the start. I was both inspired and tempered by Homer’s Achilles — and then by Odysseus: his resolve, self-awareness, and unrelenting pursuit to return to his love, Penelope, and her steadfast defense of their home while he was lost.

I was sunk in, and I knew from here on, these bits of letters on a page were the mast I would tie myself to.

Reading that book was a turning point.

It changed how I read—but more than that, it gave me access to a world I never thought was open to me.

Ancient texts, Enlightenment treatises, the early language of logic and reason... it was like a hidden gate had swung open.

In it, I found the echo of words I’d once read from the mythic King Solomon: “There is nothing new under the sun.” That even Darwin’s apes had not strayed so far from our own joys and sufferings.

I'm a different man now than I was. I believe different things, I study different things, and now somehow, i've become a full-tilt Apple fanboy for my personal tech...

but I still trace the shape of who I’ve become back to that first turning of the page.

I’ve owned several copies since then, but I always end up giving them away—loaned to friends, left behind in moves, or simply lost to time.

Last weekend I was passing through my hometown and stopped in at Scout & Morgan Books. I noticed they had a “Books About Books” section. Imagining that it couldn't possibly be there, I didn’t bother scanning the shelf - instead I went straight to the counter.

“Say, I noticed you had a ‘Books About Books’ section... you don’t happen to have a copy of How to Read a Book, do you?”

“By Adler?” she asked.

“Yeah! You know it?!”

"Wow!", I thought, "...This woman knows her stuff!"

I placed a request, and by midweek, Judith sent me a text letting me know she’d found a vintage copy and was holding it for me.

I stopped by today to pick it up.