On the Importance of Reading
Please, just read. Read anything. Any book. Any Genre. Don’t let this pastime die out.
One of my favorite quotes is from famed cosmologist (and accomplished science fiction author) Carl Sagan: “What an astonishing thing a book is. … One glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person; maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
And it’s true. Books allow humanity - across great spans of time - to find shared meaning and better understand the world: where we came from, where we’re going, and how we’re getting there.
Personally, books have been important to me for nearly my whole life. I have fond memories of my mother and grandmother both reading to me as a young boy. I remember being extremely excited to learn to read in school, and even more excited when I read my first book on my own.
Growing up, I was encouraged to read, and I devoured pretty much anything I could get my hands on. From science fiction (“2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “The Time Machine,”) to classics (“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” and the Sherlock Holmes stories), I read whatever I came across and was encouraged to do so.
Books were - and still are - an important part of my life. So so it’s sad when news articles mention the decline of reading books as a hobby. I understand that not everybody is a book collector and finds value in rare and first edition books. I don’t collect rare books myself. I collect reading copies - books that I don’t feel guilty about reading over and over again. While this store caters to a specific group of reader - actually, perhaps not even readers, but simply collectors - my hope is that everybody, collector or not, can find value in reading. Fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, romance, reference, self-help - whatever the genre - just read. It makes our society better, and as Carl Sagan so elegantly pointed out - it connects us across space and time.
