This Is Life

Back in the halcyon days of my youth my brothers and I were required to read to our parents. This was after our parents had decided that they had been reading to us for long enough and it had become our turn.

Reading had became a habit for me after I learned to piece together words into sentences in the first grade. Not long after this I began to dutifully go outside no matter the weather and pickup the NY Times from the driveway. I may have only read the Sports pages, after a quick scan of the front page, but it was reading. Later on in high school I would begin reading the Wall Street Journal which my father brought home each night after reading it for himself on the train to and from Hoboken.

Now we live in a visual society as opposed to the tactile one of my youth, where the ink from the newspaper remained on your hands as a reminder. Children might still read to their parents but it's probably from a tablet or phone, not a book. What does this seemingly small decision as to the choice of reading medium going to mean for the rest of their lives? Mercifully, I don't know for sure. It's different from my experience but not all together a bad experience. I'm willing to accept both but I still love the feel of a newspaper, with the added bonus that the ink no longer comes off on your hands and fingers. I also appreciate the different weight each individual book will has. When I pick up a heavier tome like my old Norton Anthology of English Literature the added mass causes me to pause and prepare myself to read. Given all the choices of authors and subjects which exist it's a good thing to reflect before engaging. The electronic media makes it much easier to skip around among topics and authors, without having to leave one's seat. I think the act of searching for a book, picking it up, and finding a place to begin or continue is lost upon today's generation. The search fills me with anticipation and even excitement. Flipping through the titles of electronic books gives me none of this. The books on my bookshelf tell the story of where I have been--"they're the story of my mind'' as the British Novelist Penelope Lively would say. The books I have kept reveal my life in countless ways a glance at my collection of electronic titles would never begin to indicate.