Can You Read?

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Silly question, of course you can. Otherwise what are you doing here. You’re just looking at a bunch of funny shapes, all neatly lined up on the screen, and it means nothing to you. Of course you can read. But the question is, do you read?

Sure, you read this website. You read your emails. You very likely read stuff on Facebook and probably some other things online. Maybe you read a newspaper, or, more likely these days, Google news or some other online news source. But is that it? Really?

Reading … it’s quite a skill

learning to readYou spent quite a while learning to read, and it was quite an achievement. I know the feeling. I remember being on the top deck of a bus when I was probably only about five or six and reading out the names of the shops as we were passing them, or at least as best I could. My sister got fed up and shushed me. And my mother told her to let me alone, I was learning. It felt good that I could read (even if only a little bit), and it felt good that someone stood up for me and recognised that I was doing my best.

The point I’m making is that reading is one of the most important skills we ever learn and we work hard to master it. Then, after a while, like with so many other things, we take it completely for granted. Even if we’re voracious readers, like I was, we tend to let it slide. Life’s so busy, after all, and there’s so much else to do. So we don’t read quite as much as we used to. Then, one day, without realising it, we hardly read at all.

There’s a saying that there’s not much difference between someone who doesn’t read and someone who can’t read. Sounds a bit harsh, but I think it’s true. If you’ve got the skill and you never use it, you’re completely wasting it … and you’re missing out on more than you could ever imagine.

Adventure, intrigue, and a world of learning

adventureThere are whole new worlds of adventure and intrigue lurking in the countless works of fiction, just waiting to be discovered. Time travel has been conquered by the printed word; the thoughts and ideas of men and women of the past are conveyed to us magically through books. Being able to record our knowledge is what makes our world possible. Imagine if there were no way to let other people know we’d come up with something new … or invented a new process … or completed an important task. Everything we do, we record, in some way. Think of the second World War, and the Holocaust. Without the endless documentary evidence of what happened we’d be so much more likely to let something as grotesque as that happen again.

The value of reading can be summed up by the fact that a German poet by the name of Heinrich Heine eerily foretold the Holocaust with his words: “Wherever books are burned, men in the end will also burn”. More recently, Ray Bradbury is quoted as saying “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.