Archive for December, 2007
Turn the pages over break
Photo credit: Lidia Camacho
Picture this: You just finished your last final. You have nothing else to study for, no more papers to write, no articles to analyze and no bubbles to fill in. You are officially done with academics for the semester.
So what should you do with all your newly discovered free time?
Pick up a book.
Not the required reading for class, not the scholarly study in postmodern whateverism - I’m talking about the good books. The ones that are guilty pleasures - the science fiction, chick lit or even the short-story anthology. The stuff that doesn’t require in-depth analysis, recognition of symbolism or foreshadowing and probably doesn’t have substantial academic merit. Some of it may even be children’s books or teen books. That’s perfectly fine because most of those books are much more fun to read. And reading should be fun.
The people who say they don’t like to read haven’t found the right book. There’s a book out there for everyone, and if you can find one, you can find more.
Reading just for the sake of reading has enormous benefits. The more you read, the faster you get at reading, which can be helpful when it comes time to read something you don’t want to. When you read, you become more fluent; you expand your vocabulary and become better at being able to understand and elaborate on what you just read, giving it meaning. You may accidentally become more informed. You certainly get more comfortable with language, a critical component to communication and being able to function in our society. So it’s shocking to realize how little people do it.
One in four people read no books at all last year, according to a poll jointly conducted by the Associated Press. The typical person has read only four books in a whole year. Surprisingly, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, people in the Midwest and West topped the list of book readers in the past year. This literary disparity is particularly depressing because literacy is the backbone of our society. You need to know how to read in order to do virtually any job, and even the slightest menial and literacy can make a huge difference in your income.
There’s a reason literate people tend to make more money. More importantly, you need to be reading to stay informed and active - to be able to know about and understand current events and policies and what issues are on the ballot. You need to be reading in order to hold the government accountable. In other words, reading is crucial to improving your life, no matter what status you started from, to improving the lives around you.
More than that, reading can help you relax. Sitting down with a good book lets your mind wander, taking you into a whole other world of possibility. It’s a great way to escape and de-stress. And that’s just with contemporary fiction; there’s been a recent rash of non-fiction written in a narrative story-telling style, which ranks a triple threat - interesting, entertaining and informative. These are books such as “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell, which is about the psychology and rationalization process behind split-second decisions. Another great one is “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman, which is about the psychology behind good design and how to make products more user-friendly and appealing - concepts which can be clearly seen as an integral part of the Apple philosophy, where Norman served as an Apple Fellow and vice president of the Advanced Technology Group.
More than anything else, what annoys me most about going to school is that I don’t have enough time to read the books I want to read.
With the recent release of the Kindle by Amazon - a handheld reader with free wireless for life that lets you download e-books in seconds from anywhere - and with the holiday sale prices, now is the time to spend money stocking up on books. With the upcoming Winter Break, we’ll all have time to blaze through the novels sitting on shelves that consciously had to have been ignored in order to finish essays and class readings.
Well, no more.
My goal for Winter Break is to blaze through my “guilty pleasures” bookshelf, and yours should be too.
List of Books from Ruthie’s “To Read” Shelf:
1. “The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman
2. “Love and Other Near-Death Experiences” by Mil Millington
3. “Saving Fish from Drowning” by Amy Tan
4. “Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller
5. “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
6. “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman
7. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig
8. “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson
9. “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston
10. “Arranged Marriage” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
11. “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
12. “Can’t Buy My Love” by Jean Kilbourne and Mary Pipher
13. “Religious Literacy” by Stephen Prothero
14. “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins
15. “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo
