Some years back, my nephew Nathan was talking to his mother about buying an iPod. One of the arguments he used was that an iPod could hold audiobooks he could listen to in lieu of reading them in paper form.
This caused my sister a bit of uncertainty. Hilary, my other three sibling and I had grown up to believe reading is one of the great pleasures of life. Also one of the great necessities. One thing I learned very early was if I visited someone’s house and they didn’t have any books, it was unlikely they would be worth knowing.
When we were living in California back in the 1990s, my wife had a colleague who didn’t believe it was enough just to read. What you read also mattered. I remember him saying it annoyed him when people told him how much they loved to read and then the only books they had were by writers like Stephen King and Danielle Steel.
Hey, I like King and my wife likes Steel, but they’re not the only people we read. We spend 2-3 hours every evening listening to audio books together. We just finished “A Promised Land,” the first volume of Barack Obama’s memoirs, and we’ll probably read “The Warmth of Other Suns” next.
Over the last 10 years, we have read a great deal of history. I read her a 900-page biography of Charles DeGaulle, and most of the wonderful David McCullough books. In a slightly different vein, we’ve read everything by Bill Bryson.
Until 3-4 years ago, I actually read the books aloud. But in my late 60s I started having a lot more trouble with dryness in my mouth. That was when we switched mostly to audiobooks and my reading became listening, although when we had both the book and the audiobooks, I followed along on my Kindle.
The Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook along with it have done wonderful things for reading. The backlit screen means you can read in a dark room. The built-in hard drive means you can store dozens if not hundreds of books in something that takes up as much room as one book.
We worked out a tradition with our daughter that we give her children a Kindle when they reach their eighth birthday. We have given to five of them already, and the one for our youngest will come in a little less than 23 months.
They all love to read.
That tells me Pauline and her husband Johnathan are raising their kids right.
Of course, I expected they would. We raised Pauline and her brother Virgile right.
We really did, and while there are plenty of other factors involved, making reading a bigger part of life than television is a solid step in the right direction.
Do that, and give them good values, and it’s better than 50-50 that they’ll grow up happy and successful.
That’s a pretty good combination for life.