Why read?

The question at the beginning of the post is why read? I don't expect to answer this fully here because the subject area is too vast. I can't even expect to state definitively why I read except that I prefer to read over other forms of gaining information such as watching videos, films, television, movies and so on. I find it so much more satisfying and fulfilling.

There are times I will watch a favorite program such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and will laugh and laugh at the end of the 30 minute program including commercials. There will be some spots in it that I will enjoy more than others and might revisit it on the website. I might watch The Stephen Colbert Show. Colbert is a young and energetic performer who is very talented, but I still prefer Stewart. In 30 minutes, the show is over and I go back to what I was doing before I stopped to watch the show. Stewart is not someone I pick up when I feel like it and then put it down when I get tired unless I am reading one of his book.

When I was a child, I lived in a very dysfunctional situation with parents with huge problems and in a neighborhood also with problems. I found comfort in books. I learned to read in school and my mother had a few books in the house that I read from cover to cover more than several times. I had a favorite aunt who taught me how to use the public library and signed me up for a card. My mother and father never took me there. I walked there often. I also had an imagination which helped and grew when I started to read. There was those few times I went to the show with my family and that was included in my imagination and there was the television still in its infancy. The television was a source of some of my problems as it showed the McCarthy Hearings which were a problem since my mother was born and raised in Russia and the neighborhood had their own witch hunt and picked on my family because of that. Some of our neighbors were ugly and I never forgot that. Books were a refuge and solace from that. This was the early 1950's. I felt I was rejected by people both in my family and neighborhood for who I was but never by a book.

I have two sons. One son rarely reads and watches television most of the time he is awake. The other one rarely watches television and reads often. The one that reads works and owns two companies. The one that does not read has a family of four children and a partner. Each is successful in his own way. The second one is disabled. I took them to the library often when they were growing up. I buy books for my grandchildren. I don't use the library anymore since I had to pay for books that I returned and they said I did not. I do use their second hand book store though.

When I had no choice, I used the library but learned to read too fast because of the due dates that were stamped in the books. That was better than not reading at all. Now, I buy the books and read them at a much slower pace. In college, I was a fast reader. I don't read all that fast anymore because I missed the richness of the language and the way a book was constructed. I also was in a hurry to read all the books I could. Now, I even re-read books as I did in Korea.
It was very fruitful to have done so.

I read children and young adult books now. When I was a young adult there were little to read but now there is a rich treasure of good books to read. Scholastic Press puts out wonderful books at a good price. Unfortunately, it is hard to find such books at a second hand store. There are many books in a second hand store that I don't read, but I have never ran out of good authors although I did when I was in my younger years. I like the current variety that is available and the books written by authors in other countries that are now translated. I find that often I am so familiar with authors that are now translated that it is hard not to skip ahead. An example is C.G. Jung who I am reading now. At one time, I considered learning German to read him. Now, I don't have to.

I am a writer and in order to remain a writer I have to read. I want to read authors who are better than me. I want to see innovative writing but not writing that I can't figure out what is happening. I resisted the group of writers know as the"Beats" for a long time since I got the impression that they were far out of the norm that I was used to. The first book I read out of this group was "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac which forever changed my idea of who they were. I have since read other books by other so-called Beats. I usually try writers who win the Nobel Prize for Literature if I had not read them before. I read authors who win prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and so forth just to get names of writers I have not read before. I choose books for their covers, from the recommendations from Bookmarks (I highly recommend this source) Magazines, other writers, Oprah and everyone else that seems to know what is a good writer.

I intend to change this blog which was about books that I had read into more about books in general and anything that comes to mind. I don't seem to have many readers, but if anyone has any recommendations I promise to take it on.