“You learn something totally new”
My father was a steel laborer, but when he was in the army he traveled through Europe and learned a lot of different languages; he also became a lifelong voracious reader, and all of us kids always were, too. I read so much it’s crazy, and I wish I were at home right now because I could look at my books and go through them, but I’m in a hotel room in Chicago and I can’t. I hate being without them. Even though I try to keep only the books I can’t live without, I must have several thousand.
I particularly love to read books about history and books about women—and books about women in history? Bring them on! When I start reading about a woman like Cleopatra or Catherine the Great, I have to read everything I can get my hands on that has to do with them. I really love reading about women who ruled empires, Margaret Thatcher and Eleanor Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth, and so on.
But one of the books that recently changed my life was David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. Adams, unlike Roosevelt, isn’t someone whose story we know well. He arrived in history at a pivotal moment, and he threw his intellect and his passion where they needed to go to get things done. McCullough’s writing makes you feel just like you were there, and that’s important so that you get a sense of how important John Adams was to our young nation.
Adams also got something so important: there’s no such thing as retirement. When you have brainpower, that’s your gift to the world, and if you don’t use it? You lose it. I’m at a really great time in my life. I tried being semiretired, and I got my handicap way down in golf, but I’m an entrepreneur. I want to keep using my brain and stay on the self-discovery road. I read self-help, I read golf books by that hack Nicklaus, I read books about modeling and beauty, and I’m the kind of person who will go back and read the classics, like a Hemingway or a Steinbeck.
Every time, or decade, that you reread a great book, you learn something totally new from it. When I was younger, I didn’t understand what the hoopla was about James Baldwin, but when I read him now, I’m just blown away by his prolificacy and courage. I have such respect for writers; it’s such a discipline and a gift. It’s like singing, I think: you’ve got it, or you don’t.
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Beverly Johnson is an actor, producer, and business owner whose memoir, The Face That Changed It All, was published in 2015 and details her career as the first African American model to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine.