The point is, there is always a book on the go in my life, actually, usually there are several, except for those barren wastelands between books, when I haven't quite decided what I want to read next.
Upon finishing Mockingjay a few minutes ago, I finally knew what my next Year of Being Thankful entry needed to be (good thing too, because I actually had missed the midnight cutoff for entry #5).
Books. I am thankful for books. And along with being thankful for books, I am thankful for writers. Thankful for and admiring of them, because I know how difficult it is, first just to finish writing a book in the first place, but then, often even more difficult, getting it published.
I don't know if I started reading at a particularly young age. But I do know that once I did start reading, it was always something that I loved. The first novel I ever read was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Just the first book of that series. I never even knew it was the first of a series till I was an adult. Another book I remember from primary school was A Wrinkle in Time. A very dark and weird book that I think must have been beyond most fifth-graders, but I loved it. So many incredible concepts to taste, so many weird and fantastical scenes. What a delight to engage the mind of an avid young reader. I often think I should read that book again now and see how it compares to my childish impressions of it.
Easily the best book I've ever read is To Kill a Mockingbird. The movie of the same title had been my all-time favourite movie for many years before I ever read the book. When I did finally read it, I fell in love with the quiet, gentle rhythm that masked such a horrific and enormous theme. Somehow, the book made my enjoyment of the movie better, and the movie made my enjoyment of the book better. That doesn't happen very often.
The book I've read most often is a little children's book called Sara Crewe. It's the novel that inspired the classic Shirley Temple film, The Little Princess. I intensely related to little Sara Crewe, the protagonist of the story. Her mother dead and her father off to war, Sara finds herself alone in a boarding school where people are very nice to her...until her father dies and leaves no money to continue Sara's education.
There haven't been many books I've hated. There was one I remember actually hurling across the room because it offended so intensely my impressions of what constitutes writing that deserves to be published and splashed across so many pages that trees were sacrificed so rudely to produce. It's not a surprise I don't even remember the title of that book. I think I still have it though. Even a horribly written book is still a book, and throwing any book in the garbage is unthinkable to me.
Imagine a time before books, before Gutenberg's wonderful invention. You had to trust that what the clergy and the scholars and the people in charge told you was true. You were more than likely illiterate anyway. With no books, what need of literacy if you weren't...yeah...a clergyman or a scholar or a person in charge. Heck, even most of the people in charge probably couldn't read. And there were probably a lot more clergy around than scholars. So that means...egads...that means that there were centuries, millenia even, when everyone got all their information from the clergy.
Do you really think the planet would be crawling with religion right now if everyone had been literate and had access to books other than the Bible two thousand years ago?
Hell no.
I haven't quite decided what my opinion of e-books is yet. I seem to have made the switch almost completely from being a reader of paper books to a reader of e-books. I love being able to hold a library in my hand, switch books at the click of a button if I get bored, or start a brand new book immediately without even getting out of my chair when the last page of the previous one is turned. Of course, the words "page" and "turned" are metaphors here, but you know what I mean.
I love my two big Ikea Billy bookshelves stuffed with fiction and non-fiction, with magazines and diaries and enough written work to keep me occupied for two or three years, probably. But do you think I turn to my own bookshelf when I want something new to read? Noooo. I go to the nearest online bookstore and purchase my next read on my Kobo. Paper books have such a romantic appeal...but they're just not that practical anymore.
So, I guess that means I have decided on an opinion about e-books.
Either way, paper or pixels, books are one of the grandest things in life and I would be bereft without them.
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