If you give a mouse a cookie, it’ll ask you for milk. If you give me directions to the nearest Barnes & Noble, I’ll ask you for an unlimited credit card and endless hours to aimlessly meander around my home away from home.
I’m an English person — always have been, always will be. Perhaps that makes me biased, but I believe there are benefits to be reaped from reading solely for pleasure, especially in the face of tempting invitations to relax from Netflix, Instagram and all things Internet.
Before school started, I went to my local Barnes & Noble — which ranks just above the Dollar Store on my list of favorite places, which is saying something. Admittedly, I went a little too crazy with the book-buying. I came home with a hefty addition to my collection of 20th-century American literature. I was sure to bring all my new novels with me when I came to school in the fall, and, on move-in day, found a cozy corner to house my prized paperbacks.
In the days since, that corner — once a glistening testament to my love for literature — has become dust-covered and abandoned. If I had been counting, I likely would have discovered a book has been pulled from this pile only once since I arrived here in August.
Granted, it’s not as if I’ve had an unlimited amount of time to tear through the works of Faulkner or Fitzgerald just for fun — but in the moments I have had, I’ve turned to Netflix instead.
Make no mistake — I have nothing against Netflix. Netflix could call me names straight to my face or fail to laugh at my jokes — an offense unparalleled by any other — and I would wave off the insults as if they were nothing. In other words, I love Netflix. I love it a lot.
But, newfangled video-streaming sites — and I’m aware I’m a dad for calling them that — make television so accessible that it’s become all too easy to fill up any five minutes of freedom with something digital. I’m not trying to launch an assault on screens in general, or to say technology is becoming far too powerful and is sure to turn us all into zombies within the next 10 years — but I am saying that occasionally switching from channel-changing to page-turning is important and oft-forgotten.
Here comes the starry-eyed nerd in me: I miss reading. I miss seeing words slide off a page and I miss staring in awe at a sentence and wishing that, in some other world, I had written the lyrical prose I just passed over. I miss getting lost in stories which only appear if I imagine them happening before me. I miss knowing a fictitious character like the back of my hand. I miss pouring over plotlines and analyzing sentence structures and drawing parallels between different works and reality.
I miss getting so excited about something that’s not a part of this world. I miss reading.
Granted, television shows offer a lot of the same perks as a book does — in both, the analytical among us can find ways to decipher hidden messages being sent out to those interested or crazy enough to look for them.
One day, after watching the State of the Union in class, my high school government teacher started discussing “manufactured moments,” and said if we learned anything from him, he wanted it to be that much of what we think of as real is often something scripted.
This wasn’t intended to be cynical. The gist of this was that there’s more to be seen in something that might otherwise be viewed as an everyday occurrence or a random fluke. There are intended meanings present in all interactions.
“Society is talking to us,” he said. “And if you’re not hearing anything, you’re missing out.”
What he said got me thinking — everything I have ever read or listened to, every artifact I have ever turned over in my hands, every building I have ever traveled miles to take pictures in front of effectively serves as a message conveyed by its creator.
Sure, there are plenty of mediums through which I could seek out these “secret messages” and fill myself with culture. But if you ask me, the best and purest way to do so is through reading.
Books, no matter the topic, are written by someone who has something to say. Stories are a stylized form of social commentary, readily available to anyone who’s willing to spend the time reading between the lines to find what’s really being said.
And there you have it — an English-lover’s response to why, simply, books are the best. What can I say? If you give a writer a blank page and time to type, all they’ll ask is that you listen.
Mary’s column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at m.long@cavalierdaily.com.
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