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I may be wrong, but I’m going to say that this will be in the tens of millions, I’d say billions if I was including unpublished works (I’m not including them, but really there are so many good ones, (e.g. this person.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.
