Wow! 600 posts. And they said it would never last. Also, we’re coming up on the fourth anniversary of Bryan’s Book Blog, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it next month.
As I started kicking around ideas to celebrate six-hundred posts, I had an interesting question posed to me by one of my brothers-in-law about a month ago. He IM’d me on Facebook one night, and we spent the next hour or so discussing the following question:
Why is a library of books so important to have in a home?
I was honestly flabbergasted for a couple of moments. Books are such an integral part of my life, and always have been, and reading is second-nature to me. If I don’t have a book in my hand (or close to hand) I’m probably showering … and even then there is a book on the back of the toilet. I “read” when I’m driving. A very dear friend introduced me to the wonders of the audiobook seven or eight years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I am a literary studies major, and have always wanted to teach books in one form or another (be it high school English since my sophomore year or my most recent educational goal: getting my Masters and then my Doctorate and teaching college literature classes somewhere).
I understand that reading is not for everyone … especially not pleasure or leisure reading. I know that for my brother-in-law reading takes a backseat to other interests. That’s fine, I don’t hold that against him. While I was working as an assistant teacher the last three years, working at a local charter school with seventh and eighth graders, I found that many of these kids were not readers. Quite a few of them had to be dragged kicking and screaming to read, and it wasn’t like we were reading dull books: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, and Harper Lee’s phenomenal To Kill a Mockingbird, to name just a few.
I grew up in a family of readers. My parents read (and still read) quite a bit. My brother reads and so do my sisters (one more than the other, but there you go). I am far and away the most prolific reader in the family, but that’s because as a child (and even a teenager) I was a bit antisocial. I had friends, but not friends that I went out and hung out with. I was involved in extracurricular activities but my proclivities tended toward drama and journalism. I never went to the high school football games except occasionally (usually when the photographer for the school paper couldn’t make it and I needed to step in) I went to few school dances (other than the big ones like the Winter Ball and the Senior Prom) and most Friday night and weekends you could find me curled up on the couch or in bed reading.
Reading was my solace. Reading was escapism. I had been reading on my own since I was five-years-old and never looked back. When I was young, the television was never on in the evenings, and my mother would read to me each night. We read a lot books in my formidable years: the “Mary Poppins” series by P.L. Travers, the “Doctor Doolittle” series by Hugh Lofting, Thirty-One Brothers and Sisters (and it’s sequel Forty-One Aunts and Uncles) by Reba P. Mirsky, the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series by A.A. Milne, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little by E.B. White and the books of Roald Dahl: The Fantastic Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, etc. etc. etc.
As it stands now, I have amassed quite library. At its peak it was over 1700 books strong, although that number has come down in the last month or so as I cull through the books in order to shrink my collection so that it will all fit in the UHaul trailer as we head to grad school at the end of the month. It’s been a harrowing experience, getting rid of so many books, but it is something that needs to be done, painful as it is. I’ve kept the essentials, but I still feel that somehow my library is suffering from the loss of so many good books.
All this is a long way to go around the barn to explain why I was so stunned by my brother-in-law’s question. Books are such a part of me and my life and the life of my wife, son and daughter that to ask why it is important to have books in the home took me by surprise.
After my initial shock wore off, I went about answering his initial question (and his subsequent follow-ups) in a back-and-forth that was really quite fun and engaging to participate in. My answers to WHY IS A LIBRARY OF BOOKS SO IMPORTANT TO HAVE IN A HOME? ran along these lines:
Books and Reading Promote Intelligence
Reading makes you smarter. It is as simple as that, and the more you read the smarter you get. There is something in the act of reading a book (be it fiction or nonfiction) that engages the Reader in a way that television and movies do not. Even so-called education television such as can be found on the Discovery Channel or the History Channel (much as I love those networks) pales in comparison to the knowledge one can get while reading a book. I think that this is because when most people watch television, you are usually doing something else. You are online chatting with a friend. You are checking your email. You are doing a crossword puzzle in the paper. You are playing with your kids. In other words, your attention is divided between the television and what you are doing. When you read a book it is (usually) a focusing and one-on-one experience between the words on the page and you. You absorb more when reading than when you watch TV or a movie. Of course, it all depends on what books you read. Of course, you are going to get more out of what you read when you pick up Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or John Milton’s Paradise Lost than if you are reading Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series or … I dunno … a bodice ripper or the latest sword-and-sorcery-chicks-in-chainmail flavor of the month.
Not that there isn’t a place for literary brain candy and beach reads, there is. The fact that Stephenie Meyer has gotten millions of people to turn off the television and their game stations and log off and sit down and read is a feat unto itself and one that, to my knowledge, only J.K. Rowling has achieved in recent years, especially among teens. (The fact that the books are subsequently turned into films is another problem for another day (though I have touched on that here.)) Reading, even reading subpar books like Twilight promotes literacy and it builds vocabulary. I know that I have learned more vocabulary through reading than I ever did in school. Having a dictionary in your library used to be a must, but now with the advent of the internet and sites like dictionary.com and merriam-webster.com looking up a new word you run across is easier than ever.
Reading builds basic communication skills. Fostering reading in a child is a great way to help that child learn to communicate, and as the child grows and matures, and their reading tastes likewise grow and mature, their communication skills will improve. As with vocabulary, I think that a lot of how I communicate and express my ideas came from what I learned as I was reading, more so than learning proper sentence structure or what’s a gerund and what’s a helping verb in school ever did. When you read you instinctively (and often subconsciously) absorb how language is constructed. I still can’t quite tell you what a gerund is, or why one shouldn’t dangle participles, or why we shouldn’t split infinitives, but as is hopefully demonstrated by this blog, and this post in particular, I can construct coherent arguments and express myself in a way that is—again hopefully—rational, logical and above all persuasive. All that learned mostly from books.
Books and Reading Promote (Critical) Thought
Critical thought is, perhaps, one of the biggest casualties of our modern age. When the nightly news (or in some cases the 24 hour news) has a spin, angle, agenda, and narrative; when more people vote for the next “American Idol” than the President of the United States; when so-called “reality TV” is consistently the number one thing on television (and people actually believe it is “real” in spite of the credits that roll at the end of a show which often give the names of ten or more writers), and when in 2007 the Associated Press reported that one-fourth of American adults polled had not read a single book that year, it is no wonder that Americans are losing the ability to think critically about anything. I think that if the American public had not lost its critical thinking skills and had not handed over thought to the pundits and anchors and politicians (of any stripe) the ridiculous farce that is the current debate over health care would not be the shouting circus that it is, because when you sit down and start to look critically at the facts of the various bills, you begin to see where hyperbole (and outright lies) end and reality begins. I don’t mean to bring politics up, but it is a perfect example of what I am trying to say.
Reading of any kind, but especially reading books, helps to train our minds to think critically about what it is that we are putting in our heads. As I have said above, reading is an active medium, not a passive one like television or film. Books demand the Reader’s attention and force them to sit down, focus and think about what is being read. This is a fact with any book, but if you really want to train your mind to think critically, then you have to pick up something more than brain fluff. Twilight, no matter what its merits may or may not be, will not train you to think critically. Neither will the latest John Grisham, nor will Anne Rice or Charlaine Harris. As much as I may or may not like those authors, their books and their characters, reading The Rainmaker or Dead Until Dark or The Vampire Lestat will not engage your brain and your thinker in the way that the hefty books of literature out there will. If you really want to learn and think and think critically than you need to pick up the works of John Milton, of Don DeLillo, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and William Shakespeare to name just a few. You will learn more about how to think about and how to react to and interact with the world around you from Morrison’s Song of Solomon, DeLillo’s White Noise, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet (quite possibly the greatest play ever written) than by reading all nine or ten of the books detailing Sookie’s romance with Vampire Bill.
Critical thought is, in my mind, the single most important tool that we as human beings in general and Americans in particular can have at our disposal. To be able to look at, think about, analyze and act on something critically is to be able to function in a world where we are constantly told how to think, act, and feel about everything. To think critically is to know what one should think about health care in America, to know how one should react when watching the evening news, or reading your morning paper. It is the ability to see beyond the spin, beyond the stats and polls and numbers that are thrown at us in our daily lives and find what is important and what is not. Is it important to catch all the coverage of Michael Jackson’s death and the subsequent hoopla that surrounded his passing? In the long run, probably not. Is it important to catch the ticker at the bottom of the screen while the talking heads are jabbering about Michael Jackson’s doctor and see that there is considerable Taliban opposition to democratic elections in Afghanistan or that the FDA is considering Okaying GMO food products as “organic”? Probably.
Reading helps train us to turn off our brain to the outside noise and stimuli and forces us to slow down and focus on one thing for five minutes or an hour or more. By cutting off the constant stream of information to our brain, we train our brain to look longer at something and by doing so, exercise our attention spans and stretch them so that we can pay attention for longer periods of time.
Books and Reading Promote “The Idea of Words”
“The Idea of Words” is perhaps the aspect of books and reading that excites me the most. I know, I am a book geek; I am a bibliophile with an out-of-control bibliobido, but the “Idea of Words” is exciting to me and something you should be excited about too!
Let me explain what I mean. In one of my favorite short stories by writer Sherman Alexie (titled “Special Delivery” and found in the collection The Business of Fancydancing), Alexie laments the decay of storytelling on the reservation through the story of tribal storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Through a series of unrelated but interconnected events, Thomas ends up on the run from the tribal police and barricades himself in the reservation post office. When the police arrive, Thomas tells the police to stay back because he has a gun (when, in fact, he does not). When the police call his bluff, he shouts out my favorite line in the story: “Maybe I got the idea of a gun, and that’s just as good.” This is what I mean when I talk about the “idea of words.” It is the ability to understand that, in fact, the pen is mightier than the sword. That imagination is just as powerful, and maybe even more powerful, than reality. The ability to understand not just what is being said or written, but to understand the idea behind what is being said or written is—along with critical thought—one of the most important tools that we as human beings can develop.
When Thomas Builds-the-Fire barricades himself in the post office and holds off the police with “the idea of a gun” he realizes that it is the dream or imagination that is infinitely more important than any actual by-product of those ideas. Alexie, through Thomas, shows that imagination and the idea of words is more powerful than the fact of reality, for it is through those ideas and through our imaginations that reality is shaped. The idea of a light bulb came to Edison before the light bulb and the idea of individual human and inalienable rights came before they were written down by Locke and codified by Jefferson, and with the idea of a gun, Thomas Builds-the-Fire holds the reservation post office hostage.
“The Idea of Words” is a powerful thing, and something that everyone needs to understand. All one has to do is look back at the recent American Presidential election to understand what the power of the “idea of words” really means. Think of the two words that were bandied about the most during the campaign: MAVERICK and CHANGE. Those two simple words—and the ideas that they supposedly embodied—polarized the American public to such a degree that turn-out in the 2008 American Presidential election was astounding. I won’t debate the validity of those words, that’s not why I bring them up. I bring them up because all they are is words. Two simple words: 11 unique letters between the two of them: three vowels and eight consonants, and yet these two words with such simple definitions (according to dictionary.com (maverick and change)) ignited a firestorm of political debate due to what exactly they meant in any one given context. Behold the power of the idea of words; the power of imagination over reality.
When you read, you understand the power of words. One only has to look at the longevity of such works as Paradise Lost and the plays of Shakespeare and the more recent powers of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series to captivate and hold the imaginations of millions to see the “idea of words” at work. To see the power that reading has over the imagination, and thus over reality, for as we shape our imaginations, we shape our reality.
If you doubt me as to the power of reading and the power of the idea of words, I want you to watch THIS and then read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and then ask yourself this question: Whose books were the Nazis burning? And then answer this: the works of H.G. Wells (a socialist and humanitarian), the works of Karl Marx, the works of John Locke, the works Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque … books whose ideas and words were deemed not to correspond with Nazi ideology. Why, I ask, if words have no power, did they burn them? Because words do have power. Ideas have power. And the idea of words can do more for the human mind than all of the enforced rules, laws and policies that any government can create and enforce. Again, read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and you’ll see what I mean.
This is more or less (actually, this is much more than) the conversation that I had with my brother-in-law, and the arguments I made for why a library of books is an important (and even essential) thing to have in a home. I concluded with the following: When parents choose to make a place for books in their home, whether it is a few shelves in the living room and bedrooms, or an entire room dedicated and centered on reading it conveys to children an emphasis on books. Books should be a focal point in the home, and not the television or the computer or Xbox or what-have-you. When books are emphasized in such a way, when children see their parents reading and hear their parents discussing books and the ideas in them, when they are read to, it reinforces to the child that reading is something to be valued and esteemed, and when reading and books are valued it means that these three points: Intelligence, Critical Thought and The Idea of Words are things that have value and are important. As a child is taught so he grows (to badly paraphrase) and if intelligence, critical thought and ideas are cultivated while young, then they are what the grown child will reap later in life, much to their benefit.
One of the greatest pleasures I have in life is reading, and nothing does my heart better than to unexpectedly come across my two young children (they’re 3½ and 1½) reading a book. (Such as the candid moment we caught in the photograph that accompanies this post: my son and daughter had each gotten a book, curled up together on the comfy armchair in my library and pulling the blanket up on them, “read” to each other.) When, unprompted, they turn off the television (or don’t want it turned on in the first place) and pick up a book, or ask me to read them a book, my heart soars, because even at this young age, they understand that books and the ideas and values that they promote are important because my wife and I make books a priority in our home.
If you can’t make books in the home a priority (due to finances) and would like to, then your local library is a great solution. We visit the library on a regular basis (at least once a week) and our kids look forward to it each and every time. Their eyes light up and they will consent to getting dressed and putting on shoes if it means they get to go to the library. Once their, aside from running around and meeting other children, they love to choose books and put them in our canvas library bag. My son gets honestly sad and distressed when we have to return a book he’s fallen in love with. One of the first ASL signs that they both learned was library (you make the L sign with your right hand and make little circles with it). Libraries are a great way to instill in a child a love of books and reading when having gobs of books in your home just isn’t practical.
This is the value of having a library of books in a home and this is why I have created and maintain this blog in spite of the grief that it sometimes gives me: because books and reading build better, thinking world citizens.
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