Dick and Jane

     Reading is a superpower no matter how it is taught. I learned with Dick and Jane. Despite the easy criticism that it was stereotypical I made the connection very quickly in my reading group and have never looked back with a regret. The whole word method of Dick and Jane largely replaced the previous standard in the 1930s, the phonics-based McGuffey Readers. (Thanks to Wikipedia for background.)

     It's been pointed out to me that we are now largely an image-based society based on the widespread usage of technologies like Instagram. The reasoning continues with the idea that some people lack the time for reading. It's largely true that a picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saw goes, but give me a book, comfortable chair, and good light anytime over an image, icon, or symbol. Nothing wrong with these and the clarity of a Stop Sign is truly needed in our fast paced, automobile society.

     Books, Galileo argued, are our sole means of having superhuman powers while remaining resolutely human — the power of traversing the abysses of space, time, chance, and misunderstanding that gape between our own life, our own self, our own subjective experience, and another’s. (Thanks to Maria Popova)

     One of the best Twilight Zone episodes featured Burgess Meredith as a man who wanted nothing more than to spend his time reading.

     He made a most sympathetic character in my eyes. Isn't that what we strive for as writers, an interesting story with a character or two we can like? Or is it more like F. Scott Fitzgerald noted:

     “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

     Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”
     ― F. Scott Fitzgerald