Reading the best book of all time

SOME of our most memorable years can be associated with our reading good books.
In Grade 11, I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and that book opened up my world to American literature.
In Grade 12 we studied Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
But Hemingway’s words did not grab me as did Lee’s. (I concluded later that it might have been because we were forced to read Hemingway in class but as for Lee, I discovered her myself by picking the book up from a classmate. I think that is often the best way to learn things – learn them yourself. )
Years later I read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth – and the westerner who grew up with her Protestant missionary parents in China in the late 1800s opened up the Chinese farmer’s life to me. (It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and in 1938 Buck, also known as Sai Zhenzhu, became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Recently I discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald by reading The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald wrote The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which has been made into a
movie in 2008. It starred Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet.
Reading Lee, Buck and Fitzgerald – among others – takes one into the best of American literature. 
They enrich your life.
In fact, those books are classics.
A student reading their books may absorb some of the authors’ skills to vividly paint a person, his or her character, the environment and times with mere black ink on white pages.
However, one book is the best reading material of all time. It is the Bible.
A few weeks ago one of my Papuan brothers told me that one of his goals this year is to read the Bible through – meaning he will read from Genesis to Revelation, verse by verse, chapter by chapter.
This year will be special. He will grow in many aspects if he takes heed of what he learns in the book.
For his sake and others (including aspiring leaders) I will spend a few weeks talking about and help those who want to read that bestseller.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of United States said: “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.”

Next week: How to study the Bible