I [Adrian Rogers] read constantly, but I do not read like some people read. There are some people who read novels, and I'm not opposed to that. There's some people who read philosophy and history. I wish I had time to do that. I am a contemporary reader. I want to know what's going on in the present world, more than in the past world. Although I'm very interested in the past world, I am even more interested in the present world.
I am very interested in the political scene, the world scene. I read newspapers, news magazines. I read journals. I read a lot of devotional books. I may not read them all the way through unless I find out I struck gold, but I will pick up books and get familiar with them.
I have my library, not a vast library, but it’s a good library at my house, and almost on a regular basis, before I go to bed, I'll pick up a book out of my library, and familiarize myself with it. Not read it, but familiarize myself with it because you get books that you forget. I go in almost at random, just kind of a lucky pick, and pick up a book, carry it in the bedroom with me, carry it in the bathroom with me. Before I go to bed, I’ll thumb through the table of contents, read the introduction, see where I've underlined, and see where I've dog-eared it, desecrated it by whatever means I had. “Hey, I forgot that, look at that. Look at that. That's good stuff.”
Sometimes we take a book, a good book, and put it away and we never come back to it. I am frequently just touching – I'm more like a gnat – just bouncing around, reading a lot of things.
People ask me sometimes, "What book influenced your life more than any other?" That is very hard for me to say. I generally would say a book by Major W. Ian Thomas called The Saving Life of Christ, very easy read. It's a devotional book. It talks about the Christ life, Christ in you.
Even reading that book did not teach me, I already knew what was in that book, but it just put it together for me in a very wonderful way.
This question and answer came from a Doctoral Colloquium session with Adrian Rogers and several Doctoral Preaching candidates in 1997.
