Tag: religious themes (Page 1 of 6)

In this series of blog posts, I give strategies for finding “clean reads” that go beyond relying on curated book lists. Please see “Part 1: The Toxic Sea” for a list of resources to help you find books that others think are clean, “Part 2: Know Where to Fish” to learn what types of books will be least likely to contain profanity, graphic sex and violence, and immoral themes, and “Part 3: Sort through the Catch” to find tips for evaluating the books you find. In this post, I’ll tell you how to read widely and wholesomely without going broke.

If you live in the United States, it’ll be easy for you to get free and low-priced books of all different types. The more of those you can find, the more money you’ll have left to spend on the books you’ll be required to pay full price to read. I don’t know how this process works in other countries, but my guess is that there are similarities.

Your harvest will be larger and, at the same time, less expensive if you follow these two practices:

In this series of blog posts, I give strategies for finding “clean reads” that go beyond relying on curated book lists. Please see “Part 1: The Toxic Sea” for a list of resources to help you find books that others think are clean and “Part 2: Know Where to Fish” to learn what types of books will be least likely to contain profanity, graphic sex and violence, and immoral themes.

Now that you’ve dropped your net into the water and pulled out an abundance of book titles, it’s important to sort through the catch and evaluate each book for specific content. This step takes time, but in the end, it’s time well spent. How often have you begun reading a book and been frustrated three-quarters of the way through it when something pops up that doesn’t meet your standards? That still happens to me sometimes, but it happens less often when I make an effort to do a preliminary evaluation of every book I read. In the long run, I save time and money.

There are several components to this evaluation, and I do them in whatever order seems natural, depending on whether I’m looking into downloading an ebook or standing in a bookstore or library with a book in my hands.

I was about twelve years old when I learned that big books written for adults usually contain profanity, graphic sex and violence, and immoral themes. In those days, there weren’t nearly as many books written for teens as there are now, and kids in my junior high school who liked to read devoured adult books and loaned them to their friends.

I understood that there was adult content I shouldn’t read, watch, or listen to, but it was all relative. While I avoided the bigger offenders, I was surrounded by profanity and sex talk every day at school. It was in the PG movies I went to see with my friends, and it was rampant on broadcast TV too, even if it wasn’t always as obvious. Even a lot of the music I listened to on the radio had innuendo.

It was all just a part of my world, and when I encountered unwholesome content in a book, I often read on and didn’t think much about it. I was, in many ways, both innocent and desensitized. The detoxification process took years, and I still struggle at times to keep my media choices at the level of cleanliness I want them to be.

You may be asking, “Why bother? Does it really matter?”