From about the age of 10 on, I always had a book in my hand. Many of them were what you’d expect: Babysitters Club, R.L. Stine and other scary story compilations, thick paperback novels I’d pluck off my mother’s bookshelf that weren’t meant for kids, but certainly provided a healthier glimpse (okay, wide-eyed gawk) into the emotions of sexuality than free internet porn does for today’s teens.
Some of the books, like The Giver, expanded my mind exponentially and probably upped what I’m sure was a very average, perhaps even slightly low, IQ by some significant points.
Then the internet came, and all we readers started reading less, or at least for fewer consecutive minutes at a time. I don’t know if I’ve ever gone even a couple of months without picking up a single book, but there were some years in there when I had a Kindle and the lines blurred. Kindles, of course, are much lighter to haul across borders than books, and I was happy for the chance to keep reading in English even when I’d finished all the physical books I had. What a pleasure to read in one’s native language!
My Kindles are dead, but I have the Kindle app on my phone and my computer, which is 100% not as easy to focus on. I’ve listened to quite a few books now too. It’s not quite the same as sitting down with a real, physical book, but this is a hill I won’t even skin my knee on, much less die. A good story is a good story. Some are just easier to thumb back through and isolate oneself with.
Right now I’m reading two books: one is a novel that my sister had on one of her shelves for a while but hadn’t gotten around to yet called Isaac’s Storm (it’s also been made into a movie, I just discovered).
We spent some time in Galveston on a recent trip back home, an island city off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1900 it was a booming and prosperous port…until a hurricane rolled in and practically leveled the whole thing. Thousands upon thousands died. They hadn’t seen it coming until it was too late.
Practically 124 years have passed, but the memory of the storm is ever-present in the city even now. The buildings that survived have official plaques on them, most at least 7 feet up, marking the storm surge’s highest points.
What’s fascinating to me about the book, beyond the story itself, is how much time is dedicated to the history and development of weather prediction… it blows my mind how a string of groups of people over centuries developed a science capable of understanding how wind and rain and snow and high tides happen, and how they’re connected, and when they will happen. Wow. Even though the author does his best to describe these understandings in layman’s terms, I’m about 20% under the minimum quota of understanding to “get” it all. But boy, am I glad other people get it.
Nature is surely worthy of worship, but I’d classify scientific understanding as magically godlike and awe-some, too.
The other book I’m reading is one that I’d have never picked out for myself. But my dad, the one and only John DeVries of Waco, Texas, gifts me a pile of books every Christmas. They’re not practical to get to me: they weigh a lot, and when they’re mailed to me Mexican customs charges me a not-insignificant sum to receive them.
Some, like The Best American Short Stories of ___ (insert year) are annual constants, and are both greatly anticipated and dearly treasured; others are books he thumbed through — the evidence is literally on the pages — in the half-off section of Barnes&Noble, and thought looked good.
One of those is a type of secular daily devolutional called The Daily Laws, by Robert Greene.
Again, I would have never decided to take this book home. There’s a short reading for each day of the year, which I like, and each month/chapter is a theme. But some of the themes have titles like “The Perfect Courtier: Playing the Game of Power” and “The Divine Craft: Mastering the Arts of Indirection and Manipulation.”
Yikes.
But I showed it to my partner Wuan, who is less of a softie than I am, who promptly decided that it was right up his alley and exactly what he needed. So, we’re reading it together, several “devotionals” at a time to catch up. It makes an interesting, slightly darker contrast to another classic I recently listened to, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
And you know what? It’s pretty good. It makes me think about things in a way that I’d otherwise not think about at all, which is always a good exercise. Anyway, all I really want to do in this life is to stuff as much knowledge and stories and really good lessons as I can into this brain and then alchemize the shit out of it so I can present it to or put it into practice for you, the people I love, in the hopes that it might help all of us.
So the lesson on this particular topic might be this: read what you want to read, but also let people give you things to read and read them, even if you wouldn’t have been drawn to them anyway, even if (and especially if) it’s nothing the all-seeing Google god algorithms would have stuck in front of you. Bonus points if it’s something you can physically hold in your hand, though I won’t be a snob about it.
There are whole different worlds out there, waiting for us.
If you ever get the chance, I'd recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr who was/is? the tech reporter for the NY Times. Keep those books!
HI, Sarah! Thank you for reminding me to put my Kindle down long enough to read two books a friend gave to me about a month or so ago. I feel like as long as I'm paying a monthly fee for Kindle, I should take advantage of the "free" books. I sometimes forget how much I like actually holding a real book and being able to flip back easily if I need to. Loretta