The Need to Read
Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the
world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small
WJS:
11.25.2016 by Will Schwalbe
We all ask each other a lot of
questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: “What are you
reading?”
It’s a simple question but a
powerful one, and it can change lives.
Here’s one example: I met, at a
bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her
beloved grandson. She lived in Florida. He and his parents lived elsewhere. She
would call him and ask him about school or about his day. He would respond in
one-word answers: Fine. Nothing. Nope.
And then one day, she asked him what he was reading. He had just started “The
Hunger Games,” a series of dystopian young-adult novels by Suzanne
Collins. The grandmother decided to read the first volume so that
she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the
phone. She didn’t know what to expect, but she found herself hooked from the
first pages, in which Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s
place in the annual battle-to-the-death among a select group of teens.
The book helped this grandmother cut
through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most
important questions that humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty
and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well. =Now her grandson
couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find
out where she was and to speculate about what would happen next.
Other than belonging to the same
family, they had never had much in common. Now they did. The conduit was
reading.
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