I hope not, for as Jeff Minick writes, “When we make readers of our children, when we ourselves read books, we help keep our culture and our civilization alive.”
Read the whole story here.
Posts Tagged With: Reading
Beware of the Book Burners
Jarrett Stepman writes:
A well-educated person should read deeply and broadly…Reading authors with opinions both contemporary and ancient can be a profoundly illuminating experience. It becomes quite clear that the advancement of time has led to many positive changes—and more than a few bad ones as well…’Decolonizing’ bookshelves represents a further closing of the American mind, but now intellectual shallowness is being paired with self-righteous zealotry. It’s a frightful combination.
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury
Children & Books: Why #ReadingMatters
We’ve all been told how important reading is for the development of a child’s mind, not just so they can get an A in reading class, but for their intellectually well-being the rest of their life. This has become even more important in the age of electronic gadgets. Anna Mussmann writes:
[Children] must be able to hold large ideas in their minds. They must be able to recognize the differences between logic and propaganda. They must possess the self-discipline needed to focus on issues that are boring, and seek the wisdom to differentiate between what is right versus what is expedient or amusing. Most of all, they must possess the perspective of a true education in ideas so they can think outside the echo chamber of our era.
All of this is deeply connected to what and how we read. It is not that people who use their phones frequently are necessarily dumber than people who don’t. Like any tool, though, screens can be dangerous. They can fill the spare moments of life until no time is left for thought and deep learning. They can retrain our brains and make it hard to focus on a long-form conversation, whether in-person or in print.
Books are one of the best ways to guard our minds against a misuse of screens. Books aren’t magical mind-vitamins, of course. Yet in order to cultivate the ability to think, we must engage with good, wise, and true thoughts. And it happens that the works of humanity’s greatest thinkers are found in books.
She also writes on what it means to be a “reader,” and how to set an example to children. Kristen Mae shows us how to “trick” your kids into reading — in a good way. Michelle Woo details the sad truth of why some kids stop reading by age 9 — and how you can prevent this.
Reading is the gateway to all forms of thought and subject matter. It is a doorway to our past and a pathway to what our future will become.
Make sure it is wide open for your children and remove any and all roadblocks.
On Reading, and Not Reading
If you follow my Facebook page, you know I post links to some interesting articles around the web. Here’s a round-up of some recent favorites:
Have trouble finding time to read? Are you optimizing your reading time? What are you reading goals? Why You Need a Reading Plan will answer those questions and set you on a life-long adventure of reading.
In Reading The Great Books Well Should Transcend Moralism, Ramona Tausz asks, “Can books change you? Can they make you a better person? Most importantly, will you let them try?” Learn from the Great Books.
Find out if you suffer from Tsundoku, the practice of buying more books than you can read. Is this a bad thing?
Read the troubling, A Third Of Teens Haven’t Read A Single Book In Past Year, which writes:
Many [teens] simply don’t have experience delving into long-form texts. Learning to do so is imperative…as it lays the groundwork for developing critical thinking skills and understanding complex issues…
“Think about how difficult it must be to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook when you’ve been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds.”
Follow on FB for more fascinating books, ideas and the cutting edge. Of course, stay here as well for longer discussions, Finding your Story, and the War Among the Shadows.
Categories: Books, General
Tags: #ReadingMatters, great books, Reading, Reading Plan, teens, tsundoku
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Are You Reading Enough?
Author Nadine Brandes asks the question, and explains why and how you should be.
Not Reading is Not an Option
Shannon A. Thompson writes:
As an author and full-time editor, I’m coming across more and more writers who don’t read their own genre, or — even worse — don’t read at all. There are generally two types of these writers.
1. Writers who claim to read but obviously don’t (and I’ll get to how it is obvious later).
2. Writers who haven’t read anything since they left high school twenty years ago.
Spoiler Alert: Neither of these options is okay.
Writers, please, oh please, you must read—and you must read often, especially in your own genre. As the infamous Stephen King once said, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” I adamantly agree with him.
Read the rest here.
Don’t Be a Book Snob
Anastasia writes on Reading and Snobbism.
And on 
Darrick Dean 