Quarantine Series: Learn something new

Learn how to Read….Again

If everyone will just give me an honest five minutes I’m sure we can get somewhere. If you can sound out these words going from left to right, forming sentences and then on to paragraphs without having to take Tylenol for a headache or Midol for cramps than I assume when you were 5, 6, 7 or 12 you learned to read. I’m also going to make a powerful assumption that there was something tangible in your hand when you first started this journey. You read words like cat and dog. You put sentences together like “Mat sat” and you got excited when you could finally sit down and read “Hop on Pop”. 

The world opened up to you.

You started recognizing that words are everywhere…on that STOP sign you just passed, on that restaurant sign, on those rocks (don’t read that honey). You started asking questions: What does that say Mom? What does that say mom? What does that say mom? What does that say mom? What a glorious time.

Then life happened. Not just life filled with growth and adult responsibilities but life filled with a changing world. A world of access to everything and a computer with access to everything in everyone’s back pocket. A life of speed (not the drug but actual velocity) and instant gratification. Life in 2020.

That being said, I ask you, honestly, if you have read a hold in your hands, flip the paper pages book complete with that “old book smell” within the last six months? If the answer is “no”, I invite you to learn something new:  learn to read again.

 “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

― Groucho Marx,

The friends I made in my childhood I still retain. Occasionally, especially now having children of my own, I visit them. I have met and adventured with countless decent, brave and remarkable people over the years. I have cried with them and shared their victories. And always in times of loneliness,  I have had a few really bosom friends that I can find companionship amongst. I can always feel home when I pick up Conan Doyle or Austen. There have been times when I read nothing else but the Bible and Charles Dickens. After a bit of that my husband and I can’t communicate anymore because my vocabulary becomes too dated. When I read “Old Yeller” to my kids, I laid down my head along with my seven year old and we had a solemn cry. My children and I have shared adventures of great magnitude in front of our fire through the winter months and have played Captain Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins until I was concerned that the neighbors would get to wondering if they heard “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum” anymore.

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I don’t doubt that reading on a device has immense conveniences but I do think that something, perhaps remote, is lost when you give up the paper book for a reasonable facsimile. This is nothing compared to the distressing reality that masses of people aren't reading anymore. At all! They aren't reading books at all! I have to object. We may all be different and have vastly varying strengths and opinions and tastes but we are all the same in many ways. There are things that may not be necessary but are valuable. They may not be missed when they are gone but they would enhance if present.

 “A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”

― Astrid Lindgren

I pose one question, if it was important when we were children, should it be unimportant now?

Picking out favorites from my favorites is just too hard and some might think me cliché in my picks (especially if they haven’t read them because then they just wouldn't understand) so I jot down a quick few to spark interest and “implore you to exert yourself” as the birds did to Peter Rabbit when he was hopelessly caught.

Persuasion By Jane Austen

Dracula By Bram Stoker

Princess Bride

All Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

Gaining Favor with God and Man

Switch on Your Brain By Caroline Leaf

Mere Christianity By C.S. Lewis (and frankly you could read his Chronicles of Narnia anytime in life. I just read them all last year....again)

Around the World in eighty Days By Jules Verne

Oh I have to stop!

If you have children please read “Honey for a Child’s Heart”. Just do it.

I refrain from harping anymore. You know how I feel and even if you have entirely giving up the childhood feeling that great fiction gives, I haven’t. I have a book waiting for me upstairs. A solid, Dickens that I’m 400 pages into so I am beginning to know the people within on a first name basis. Just thinking about spending a quarter of an hour in their company whilst my raucous household sleeps makes me a tad giddy. If you don’t get it that’s okay, I’m sure I wouldn’t get lots of things about you. But we can still get along.