Books have been around in virtually the same form for thousands of years. It’s old school. Very old school. So when someone from the younger generation mentions something about reading a book, believe it or not, it’s met with scrutiny more than envy. Bottom line–it’s not cool to read books. I’ll never forget a few years back my then 14-year-old daughter was setting up a profile for some social webpage and when the profile’s question was “Which books have you read recently?” My daughter’s comment was, “Very funny.” Go ahead and frown, I did. I’m a writer. She was too embarrased to even admit she might have read a book because it’s uncool. Book-readers are nerds, right?
Enter the Kindle and iPad. The epitomy of cool. I think the iPad even comes with a pair of shades. Because these new digital devices are so cool the kids are gobbling them up. Now they can discuss what they’ve read recently because it wasn’t done on an archaic, dusty piece of brown paper, but their new digital thing which they can hear music on or surf the web. But what they’re really doing with a lot of these devices is reading. Even if it’s a webpage or a text–it’s still reading. And we all know what reading texts leads to–reading books. Okay I made that up, sort of like smoking pot leads to heroin addiction. But maybe, just maybe, if owning an E-reader is such a cool thing, possibly it may just lead to reading. And we all know reading leads to eternal happiness–or an addiction to morphine, I forget how that works.
The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum.
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