Quote Of The Day #38

“It’s better to have your nose in a book, than in someone else’s business.”

I love books, I am a serious bibliophile. I cannot imagine not reading at least a couple of books a week; I have done so for as long as I can remember. I was devastated back in 2007 when the bookshop in the town in regional Queensland where I live closed; it was a tough few years until Amazon introduced the Kindle I can tell you!

It always makes me sad when children at tell me they “hate reading.” It is such a simple thing but it opens up the whole world. Not only does it open today, it opens the thoughts of everyone whose words have been recorded over the past several thousand years – “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child” as Cicero said. A quick survey of the internet reveals that a quarter of adult Americans have not read a book in the past twelve months. Alarmingly, it is the poorest people in society who read the least; according to a UK report in 2014, more than six in 10 (62%) of those from the richest backgrounds said they read daily or weekly, compared with four in 10 (42%) of those from the poorest. Education is the best (only?) way out of poverty, reading widely is vital to education.

Instead of siting watching braindead reality shows or trawling through the internet to look for things to be ‘offended’ by, perhaps people could read a book or two. I have heard of a tradition in Iceland (Jolabokaflod or ‘Christmas book flood’)  where people give each other books on Christmas Eve and then sit in bed and read all day. Sounds great!

And, like Thomas Aquinas, I fear the man of a single book (“hominem unius libri timeo,” for those of you who like your Latin tags in the original). There are a disturbing number of people who read, or have read to them, only one book. Bet you can’t guess which book (or books) I’m talking about. Surely it is better to read a thousand books once than read one book a thousand times? I’m not sure you can genuinely be a called a ‘scholar’ if the only thing you have read is a book of fairy stories and lots of commentaries on those stories. There is a hilarious meme of Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson suggesting that perhaps people need more books. Enjoy.