Never Out of Style: A Good Book: This is a book review about reading books. Please. Read books. Nothing – absolutely nothing – compares to the experience of reading a book.
This view of book-reading today might be seen as heresy. In the competition for book-reading time, books often lose out to the Internet, movies, cell phones, and video-games. Still, nothing compares to the experience of holding and reading an actual book.
When Students Find a Good Book
Roxann Grissom, a career high school teacher in Chouteau, Oklahoma, said, “I discover over and over how books add to teenagers’ lives. I am appalled when they are denied the excitement of reading a fantasy book, such as The Hobbit, because small-minded people think it is witchcraft. I am delighted when they find a book on their own – like the girl who read Johnathan Safran Froer’s Everything is Illuminated – and learned more about the Ukraine than she would ever learn in a World History course.”
Teachers are often humbled by the student who sees the loneliness and longing in the Clown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night because most students do not see him as a fully-developed character with human traits. Teachers can also be depressed when a book that they love, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, fails to engage the students, though the majority of them are still awed by the juxtaposition of its familiar childhood story with the brutality of its also unfortunately familiar plot of racism.
Betty Wilkinson, a college professor at Rogers State University, says she “delights when every new class of students is amazed at what Frankenstein is about.” People who have never actually read the book should do so. They will discover that it is not the typical horror story popular culture would lead them to believe. However, it is a horror story – not one of a monster run amuck but of a child abandoned by its parent. Yes, that kind of horror story.
The Need to Read
Grissom noted, “When I was growing up, my whole family read. They still do. The world is larger than Chouteau, than Tulsa, than Oklahoma, than our country, than this universe.”
Books are more relevant today than they were one hundred years ago when they were one of the sole entertainments. They are relevant because they are always there. When the electricity is out, the Internet down, the family gone and friends not around, the need to curl up on the couch with a good story can always be satisfied - even if using a flashlight to satisfy the desire.
While today’s young generation of readers may have “movie-reference” reactions to books, they are still reading. College junior Luke Moffitt, read Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 for the first time on a trip to Brazil this summer. He preferred Bradbury’s book to Orwell’s and then asked, “Is there a decent movie of it?” Unfortunately, the answer is no, although Mel Gibson did have the rights to Fahrenheit 451 and was supposed to make a version of it years ago. The 1973 movie is one that even Bradbury couldn’t find a good word to say about.
Another immensely readable book that people are also hoping to see as a film . . . or two or three is The Beekeeper’s Apprentice , the first in Laurie King’s highly imaginative series about Sherlock Holmes and King’s invented heroine Mary Russell who becomes his apprentice and eventually his wife. Sherlock Holmes is almost expected to be seen on film, especially now that Robert Downey Jr. has taken him on. However, movie or not, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters, and the contemporary writers’ use of them, never fail to bring reading enjoyment.
The book is the thing in the end. Read one!
References:
Grissom, Roxann. Personal Interview. 28 Mar. 2010.
Moffitt, Luke. Personal Interview. 13 June 2010.
Wilkinson, Betty. Personal Interview. 16 Feb. 2010.
Shaun Perkins - Shaun Perkins, teacher, poet, storyteller, porch-sitter, beekeeper, gardener, writer, has been a high school and university teacher for ...
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