I read a lot.
Books, newspapers, magazines, news stories . . . fiction and
non-fiction . . . history, current events, fantasy, business books and
articles, how-to books, and on and on. All right, I’ll admit it . . . I’m a bit
of a book addict. And while most of my news reading is via my computer (I
subscribe online to the New York Times and Washington Post) I still manage to
check at least half-a-dozen papers a day as well as on-line news outlets like
Huffington Post and Politico, CNN, Fox and other networks.
I love to read.
I guess I was lucky. My parents read to me (and my sister) a lot. Always a
story at bedtime when I was a kid. Reading was easy for me. It’s not for
everyone. Some people just don’t like to read, others have more serious issues
like dyslexia, which can make reading a tough challenge . . . or an eye or ear
issue, which can delay or hamper one’s ability to enjoy the escape many books
for kids offer . . .or a challenge with comprehension, which can make reading
and understanding what’s being read more difficult.
So what’s the point?
A couple . . . Reading at any age is important, and reading
a variety of things, I think, is also important. Read more than one newspaper
and one gets more than one perspective. It’s like watching TV . . . watch Fox
and you get one take and watch MSNBC and you might get another. Information
from multiple sources makes us better informed. I grew up in a family that
gathered around the table every night and discussed not only what we kids did
during the day, but also current events. It made us pay attention.
Of course we didn’t have video games, wide-screen high-def
TVs connecting to streaming movies and hundreds of TV channels, or smart
phones. Probably a good thing.
So we read.
Today, as I said earlier, most of my news reading is online,
but I struggle with real books vs books on my Kindle. I do subscribe to several real, printed on paper magazines . . .
My girls gave me a Kindle a couple of years ago and I use it
regularly, take it with me when I go out and download a number of books every
month. Digital versions of my magazines are also
downloaded to the Kindle.
My conflict is not that I don’t like the Kindle, but that I
also like the touch and feel of real books. They make me feel comfortable,
filling the shelves in my living room and office. I’m in the process of giving
a number of them away . . . books I won’t read again . . . but carefully
keeping many of the military and history books as well as a few fiction series
(and admittedly a few books kept for their cover art . . . like Frank
Frazetta’s Conan the Barbarian covers on the Robert E. Howard series and the
complete set of Tarzan paperbacks highlighting a variety of artists, like Boris
Vallejo, Joe Kubert and others). Most books I just won’t read again and again,
so off they go overseas to troops, or the local hospital and a senior living facility
down the road, as well as to a local used-book shop with my credit going to a
school. Not at all noble . . . I’d never throw books away, and giving them to people
that will read them seems a natural course.
So online, Kindle or off the shelves, reading, in large part
thanks to my parents, remains a major part of me. Do parents today read to
their kids enough and encourage them to read? Probably not . . . There are many
more distractions nowadays, and that’s too bad . . . Reading has taken me to
places real and imagined and to times past and times in the future, put me in a
tank in North Africa during World War 2, on a farm in the Midwest, in New
Orleans after Katrina, and a million other places.
Those are the places we should encourage our kids to go.
Grab a book and find a comfy spot . . .
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