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A Few Words of Introduction
Books. In my
living room you'll find the seed library of a monastery ready to hoard the forgotten
learning through the coming dark ages: hundreds of books from the last 100
years, holding on fragile paper the wisdom, amusement and historical depth that is being
daily lost to electronic media and growing illiteracy. Every day of
contact with brazenly ignorant people reminds how much we've already lost,
forgotten or never knew, simply because we don't read. So I read. And you won't
know how small and uncomprehending you once were until you start reading.
There was a time when a "well-read" person was an
educated person. Now, an "educated" person is one who's been to
school, which barely requires a person to be literate upon graduation, even from
college. There is the ability to read, of course, but as the university system
breaks every subject into smaller and smaller bits to allow for more and more
students and their endless, stale, purposeless theses, even the
"educated" find no time for or pleasure in reading.
I believe it was
Gore Vidal who said that there is almost no non-academic intellectual life in
America. So true. To read about a subject, you really ought to be
"studying" it (which means paying and being made to study it at
school). To pick up some books on your own and pursue a whim into subjects that
have no particular money-making application -- or worse, simply bring you a
private pleasure -- is unexplainable in our times. We even have "summer
reading," which means crap novels that you might guess are supposed to be a
break from "heavy reading," except that it's not. All you really need
to pass as an intelligent person in America is a paper from some college, a
can-do attitude, and a vague sense of surface-level events no older than three
months. An hour or two of TV a day at the minimum, and maybe the ability to do
simple sums. What keeps all
these Barnes & Noble chains alive? I suppose they can survive off
magazines, computer and business books and the Oprah club alone, but why stock
such a huge selection? Something tells me that someone, somewhere must be buying
those books -- the good authors I've read, but have never found a soul to share
it with. If you're "too busy" to read, you ought to take a look at
what you aren't too busy to do. What I see is a whole population of
"busy" people wasting time in the most disheartening ways.
SO ... I'll tell you
what I'm reading, what I've read and what I think. If you're a student and read
my chosen book in a class, good for you -- now go read something they didn't prescribe for
you. If you read the book on your own, even better. If you haven't read it, but
just might after my little review, feel free to violently disagree with my
review. If you have
no idea what I'm talking about, go grab your remote and give your brain a rest
from reading the last couple hundred words. |