If you have spent much time at all around this little blog of mine–or if you’ve read my book–it will not surprise you when I say that I can scarcely imagine life without books, books, books. We just got several huge boxes of books in the mail yesterday–home schooling supplies for next year–and a number of the titles were books I had read and loved as a child. I cooed over them as if I was reuniting with old friends. In my essay in the forthcoming collection Talking Taboo, I wrote:
“Books have always been more to me than amusement or entertainment; they are like living beings that I turn to for comfort, advice, explanation, and reassurance. I never thought there was anything odd in the fact that I would, even from the age of nine or so, reread key passages in various novels at points in my life when my own circumstances seemed congruent to something I’d read there. That, after all, is what the grownups did in church: find passages in the Bible that said something that was related to the point they wanted to make, and read them to back up their point. I might not always have been able to get God to co-sign what I was thinking, but I could get Beverly Cleary. And that was good enough.”
My friend Karen Swallow Prior has a post up at the Atlantic on recent debates about whether reading makes people better and more ‘moral.’ She argues that ‘deep reading’ of great literature makes us ‘more human.’ Another friend, Amy Julia Becker–who has loved books for as long as she can remember–responded on her blog, saying she worries that “conflating our humanity with reading ability (or proclivity) will only lead to discrimination and even death for people with intellectual disabilities.”
(Karen’s response will appear on Amy Julia’s blog today.)
What words do you use to describe what books mean to you?
What experiences have you had of people who, for various reasons, could not or did not read, and who nonetheless embodied and expressed the empathy and largeness of spirit that we sometimes attribute (perhaps wrongly) to extensive education?
