Tag: why reading matters

As it Appens

 

 

Back-to-school time once again and with it comes a sudden, distinct briskness in the air, a certain desire to buy new markers and discussions with The General about how education has changed on our daily walks.

I read lately that this current generation of parents, right now, will very likely be the last to wax nostalgic about genuine, hard cover books as opposed to interactive ebooks and ipad versions. This is not to say that they will eschew the technology for their own children of course but rather, be the last to sentimentally recall reading an actual picture book – exclusively – whilst propped up in someone’s lap. There are plenty of arguments for and against ebooks vs books and redundant to list them here (and unless you have been living in a sealed cave you will have seen the Stephen Fry meme noting that “Books are no more threatened by Kindle, than stairs by elevators”) but what strikes me, is that we often don’t acknowledge that the reason that we were so wholesomely amused in The Good Old Days was because nothing else was available.

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Reading Matters

 

I have been between books for a while now partly because I have a new job which has required a massive learning curve (and I’ve been steadying myself of an evening with the cozy perfection of Nigel Slater’s food writing) and partly, because I recently completed (she said, not without some pride) the entire series of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s non-fictional “novel” series.

Fortified, I then pressed onward with the entire Neapolitan volumes written by the hauntingly hard-to-read, hard-to-put-down, hard-to forget Elena Ferrante whose work I now admire immensely.

These books are like opulent, rich meals – with dessert – and beg to be savored not gorged, since they are certainly not easily digested afterwards. With Knausgaard particularly, it was troubling to decide if I applauded what he was doing (writing frankly about his life without any filter and thus exhibiting a total disregard for anyone else’s feelings) or despised it; however, what intrigued me most were his descriptions of the everyday and the banal which he chronicles from childhood to the present day; the expression of a cashier he might never see again; the certain feel of a day; the outside weather echoing what he felt within himself; his documentation of a parent’s sharp, throwaway, put-down which crushes him.

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