C.S. Lewis once said that an atheist couldn’t be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere, according to George Herbert — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises; fine nets and stratagems’.
At the age of eight I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist, but God had certainly mapped out a strategy to call me to himself through my reading. The oldest in a rowdy family of five children, I sought solitude in books as soon as I could read. We lived in an outer borough of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a bit too rural at that time to warrant a public library, though we did rate a weekly visit from the bookmobile.
A bookmobile is just what it sounds like: mobile books. A bus had been converted into a small, rolling library (painted forest green, if I remember correctly) and it made the circuit of communities like ours, arriving once a week to give access to books from the great Carnegie Library in the centre of town. The books were frequently rotated, and you could request a book one week and receive it the next, if you had a title or an author you were looking for.
