I have a job at the
Corsham School, which also happens to be the place that I study. They
have a little system where the 6th Form students are able to work
there. My job is to be an MDSA during lunch time and clean up after
children who are too lazy to walk to a bin after they eat. Anywho,
while I do this, if I ever notice that one of the children is reading
a book; I’ll approach them and say “Reading is cool!” and give
them a sweet. The reason behind this is that reading actually is
cool, and the children always seem to be very amused when I tell them
it. So basically, today’s post will be about the reasons why reading
is cool… Or the reasons that I think reading is cool… Or more
specifically, why reading fiction is cool.
Firstly, think about
the number of books that have been written throughout time, I may be
wrong, but I’m going to say that this will be in the tens of
millions, I’d say billions if I was including unpublished works (I’m
not including them, but really there are so many good ones, (e.g.
this
person. I’ve only read two of their short stories but they were
great!). But anyway, as I was saying, there are so many books that
have been written, so many that if, at ten years old, you started the
habit of reading a book a week, you could maintain this for your
entire life even if you lived for another hundred years! Every week
finding out the ways in which the many different authors of the world
think and see the world and learning a little more about the human
condition.
For my second point,
I would like to actually use an analogy, or a simile. I can’t
actually think of which this is, which is pretty appalling seeing as
I study English. Anyway, imagine there is, in existence, an entire
universe which is separate from ours and which we can never visit.
It’s full of its own mysteries, histories, tragedies and comedies,
but all of this will remain totally unknown to us humans due to the
fact that it exists in a separate realm of reality. But imagine there
is some kind of link between these two universes, information travels
from the other universe to ours in the form of psychic waves. These
waves find their way to the minds of the people of the world with a
passion for writing, and, unaware that they’re psychic waves; they
think they’re their own original thoughts. Once this information is
in a writer’s head it will burn away at the back of his or her mind
until he or she is able to record it in the form of words. That’s
what books are.
Books create a window
into the ideal fictional universe that we can never reach. The world
where aliens exist and have exciting adventures across the galaxies,
the world where there are lands that do not share a common history
with anywhere in our own world and are the homes to mythical
creatures, the world where unrequited love merely means a quest for
requisition, the world where anything is possible. That is why
reading is cool. Sure, this fictional universe might not actually be
real, but it exists in the imagination of every writer on the Earth.
Who knows which windows will be opened in the future? And which tales
from the realm of imagination will be the next to capture the hearts
of the world’s readers.
Well I’m done now; I’m gonna go do some reading.
