Welcome to Wonderland

(via unburyingthelead)

My mother has a literal (and literary! lol I’m punny) library at home. When I was a kid, video games weren’t allowed in our house because “they rot your brain,” and we didn’t have cable tv. So when I got grounded, aka “no tv”, I didn’t care- tv generally tended to suck anyway, so all I did was read. And I read a lot.

There’s a phrase in “The Little Princess,” when Sara’s papa is describing her to her new headmistress, telling her that she has “a voracious appetite for books, she devours them.” That’s what I did. Every new book was an awesome adventure to places so much better than where I was.

I read and I read and I read, and occasionally my mom would try and get me to read something classic- other than the fantasy I always read- and I, being the smart-ass that I was, told her she should be happy I was reading at all and look how illiterate most other children are nowadays. I don’t think I realized at the time how right I was, nor how grateful to her I’d be, years later. I read incredibly fast, people comment on it all the time, and I genuinely enjoy reading. I’m thankfully without the idiotic mindset that “reading is like, lame.”

I think that people who don’t read just haven’t found good books yet. I despised “Great Expectations.” I adored “His Dark Materials.” “The Secret Garden” bored me to tears, whereas “The Big Book Of Science Answers” had the probably unexpected and rather unfortunate side effect of me constantly quoting random science facts at every and any opportunity. “Did you know? Did you know? Did you know?” I found “Animal Farm” annoying and obvious compared to “1984” and didn’t like “1984” just because it made me really, really sad, but it was still a good book. “The Lord Of The Rings” is still to this day, in my mind, the most obnoxiously self-important, tedious drivel I have ever read in my life. I think I actually fell asleep reading it somewhere between pages 24-28, which were describing the dust on the road in minute detail, and page 812, where something resembling plot actually showed up.

Anyway, point being: “Classic” books aren’t necessarily “good” books. What constitutes a good book is if it makes you think, makes you feel, makes you desperately want to turn the page, to know more, to know what happens next, to understand. I think the love of reading comes with a natural, passionate curiousity, or maybe that curiousity inspires a love of reading, maybe they create each other, who knows.

Watching tv is a one-sided experience which uses the barest minimum brain power imaginable. Even the marginally more engaging activity of playing video games doesn’t nurture anything but particularly dextrous fingers and a foul mouth. Now don’t get me wrong- there are some great tv shows, (I don’t have tv personally, I watch online), and I absolutely fucking love video games. But I had the fortune to get into video games when I was old enough to have the sense to limit myself and understand that there are better things in the world. Growing up plugged into things, you never stop to wonder what is outside your shiny, electronic plastic box, and you miss out on a lot.

I guess what I’m trying to say is unplug yourselves. You’re online right now- honestly, when is the last time you read a book because you wanted to, and not because someone made you? Open your eyes. Open your mind. Explore. Learn. Please- we are the future. It’s our responsibility to make sure the world doesn’t end up a giant pile of illiterate morons, because we are turning into those illiterate morons. Let’s stop it now before it’s too late. Encourage reading, education, imagination, and exploration in your children and please, please, please: get off the damn phone while driving.