My books tell the tale of who I was — and who I’m steadily becoming

By David McElroy · November 9, 2018

When I bought this house three and a half years ago, I knew I’d have some issues related to its age. It was built in 1928, which lends it some charm, but it comes with problems, such as old floors that aren’t quite level. That sort of thing.

I have hundreds and hundreds of books. When I first started unpacking the boxes to put them onto my book shelves a few years ago, I discovered that the weight of the books combined with the slight warps in the floors meant the massive shelves weren’t stable.

Because I was afraid they might fall over and hit one of the cats, I left the books in boxes until I could get around to having someone come in to anchor the shelves to the walls for stability.

Somehow, I’ve never gotten around to doing that. The book boxes have remained the cats’ favorite playground and I’ve gotten accustomed to digging into boxes to find books I need. (One day, I’ll fix the shelves. Honest.)

Tonight, I went looking for a book and I had to empty several boxes in the search. As I looked at the stacks, something struck me.

There are a lot of these books which I wouldn’t buy now. I realized that I had been a radically different person when I bought them — and I suddenly realized that these books tell a lot of truth about who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.

I don’t get rid of books, at least not intentionally. (I lost some in the last move, and I’ll never know what happened to them. That’s a depressing tale.) This means that I have books going back to my college years — and I’ve continued to collect books in all the periods since then.

Over the years, I’ve organized my shelves mostly by subject. I’ve thought seriously of organizing them by the Library of Congress system or the simpler Dewey Decimal system. I realized tonight that I need to arrange them chronologically — because they tell quite a bit of my story.

A couple of decades ago, I was reading a lot of theology, both the serious kind (dense intellectual books by Francis Schaeffer, for instance) and the more popular kind (lightweight volumes by Charles Colson, for another example). As I looked at some of those books — and realized that I had no desire to open them again — it occurred to me that I have no interest in reading theology anymore.

Why? Is it because I know everything there is to know? Is it because I have everything figured out? No, it’s nothing like that. It’s simply because I read enough to come to peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in those books.

I realized that I was never going to figure out the truth about God by reading about the experiences of Charles Finney or the arguments of Jonathan Edwards. I’m glad I read all those things, but I finally realized that any smart person could build a systematic theology on the foundation of what other people had told him to believe. I wasn’t going to find truth there. I could only find other people’s perceptions of truth.

My older books are very heavy on political theory and economics as well. The earlier examples of those are almost comically partisan and I can’t believe they ever interested me. As I grew, I bought more serious works and confronted tough ideas. But I find that most of what really interests me about political theory was voiced by the 19th century abolitionist Lysander Spooner and most of what interests me about economics was written by those of the Austrian school.

I don’t really need more convincing that human beings deserve to be free and that government intervention in economies hurts everyone, so I never read those sorts of books now.

So what dominates my more recent purchases? They’re mostly things about personal transformation. I have a lot about psychology. There’s quite a bit about personality and its development. I have more books about child development and how children learn than I remembered.

As I considered the changes in what I buy and read, something occurred to me. I like the person I am now better than the person I was a couple of decades ago.

I’m glad I know a lot of the facts and theories and history that I studied heavily when I was younger. I was clearly interested in exploring everything about the world out there. I wanted to understand the world around me, a place which frequently didn’t make sense.

But the books I choose now represent a turn inward. They represent my need to understand myself better — and in understanding myself better, to connect with someone and become a deeper and greater person than I could have ever been before.

When I was young, I obviously explored the world around me. It seemed alien and I wanted to understand it. As I matured, I turned to a far tougher quest — the desire to understand the human heart and mind and soul, starting with myself.

I guess I knew all this. I suppose I was conscious of the ways in which I’ve changed. But seeing it through my books tonight made me feel it in a way that I hadn’t really understood before.

Suddenly, I realize — again — that a person’s library tells who he is and who he’s been. I have the urge to arrange these books and use them to explain myself — once I find someone who’s interested in understanding who I am, of course.

Note: I can’t leave this behind without begging you to read a few books that have meant a lot to me. Ray Bradbury’s brilliant short novel “Fahrenheit 451” was written in the 1950s, but it will teach you a lot about modern culture and why we’re disconnected from one another. “The Lucifer Principle,” by Howard Bloom, will force you to re-examine many of your assumptions about the world. It’s hard to explain it, but it had a huge impact on me. About 10 years ago, I had my understanding of the world turned upside down by a very simple book of psychology called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me),” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. It’s a simple book that explains how cognitive dissonance makes it almost impossible for most people to reject what they already believe when they face new facts that contradict their existing beliefs. It will help you understand why people do some of the insane things they do. (I have to stop now before I beg you to read dozens of books.)

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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