Sunday, January 31, 2016

We Read To Know We're Not Alone


Every once in a while, I get the crazy notion that I want to write a book. Then, of course, I get an assignment to write a 20-page paper and I come to my senses rather quickly. This passing fancy stems not from a love of writing, but because I love reading so much.

I recently started reading a book around midnight in the hopes that it would exhaust my mind enough to sleep. I finished the book around 5 am, and while I was exhausted the next day, I can’t necessarily say that I regret it. It’s not the first time I’ve pulled an all-nighter reading a book, nor is it the first time that I’ve made poor choices regarding books. As a child, I remember hiding in closets and under stairs with a book and a flashlight for hours when I should have been cleaning the garage or helping in the yard.

People often say to me that they have no time for reading, and while I probably wouldn’t recommend my overnight read-a-thon approach to other people, I would take a good book over any other form of entertainment. W. Somerset Maugham said that, “The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.” I have so many books that are truly a part of my life and have shaped me as I’ve grown. They have been my companions, my friends, my escape when life seems to be too much. At any given time, I’ll be listening to an audiobook, reading a book on my Kindle app, and have at least two physical books lying around the house that I’ll pick up when I have a moment.

This is my favorite Norman Rockwell drawing – it depicts how I feel when I read a book. Inside a book is a world that I’ve never explored, and suddenly anything is possible. It’s almost like stepping inside someone else’s head for a few hours and broadening my understand to a point of view that I could never have, because I see everything through the lens of my own experience.

The book Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel that depicts a society where books are illegal. While this concept is clearly horrific in and of itself for me, what was more disturbing was the process of how this society got there. When someone reads a book, they suddenly know something that someone who hasn’t read it doesn’t know. In an effort to make things “fair,” they slowly go shortening books and concepts, reducing them to soundbites on a television so that there is total knowledge equality. In our world where everyone is more concerned about being politically correct than being kind and intelligent, I feel this has frightening implications for our future.

A favorite gift.
I love learning. I love reading. I love changing and growing and becoming something more than what I was yesterday. I felt the great need to write this, partly because I’ve been reading like a mad person lately, and partly to remind myself that I love this process. School occasionally tries to convince me otherwise, but the books I’ve read are as much a part of me as my friends and family.

That’s all for tonight. Got to finish that crazy-long paper early tomorrow morning. And there’s still 15 pages before my chapter ends.