Reading Books Is Fundamental

From black leftist Charles Blow, at the New York Times:

The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.

It was a religious picture book about Job from the Bible, bought at Kmart.

It was on one of the rare occasions when my mother had enough money to give my brothers and me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever we wanted.

We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but that path led through the section of greeting cards and books. As I raced past the children’s books, they stopped me. Books to me were things most special. Magical. Ideas eternalized.

Books were the things my brothers brought home from school before I was old enough to attend, the things that engrossed them late into the night as they did their homework. They were the things my mother brought home from her evening classes, which she attended after work, to earn her degree and teaching certificate.

Books, to me, were powerful and transformational.

So there, in the greeting card section of the store, I flipped through children’s books until I found the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the book fascinating in part because it was a tale of hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen of God, who in those pages was a white man with a white beard and a long robe that looked like one of my mother’s nightgowns.

I picked up the book, held it close to my chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never made it to the toy aisle.

That was the beginning of a lifelong journey in which books would shape and change me, making me who I was to become.

That's a beautiful story.

Keep reading.

Blow was inspired to write about books from Jordan Weissmann, at the Atlantic, "The Decline of the American Book Lover." Yet, while the overall numbers on book reading are down (the average number of books read per year per person, for example), the numbers aren't all that bleak. There's lots of reading going on, even in this day and age. Indeed, Weismann argues that, 10 years after the introduction of Facebook, the decline in book reading may have bottomed out. As for Charles Blow, he needs to be spreading his gospel of book reading to the black community, especially to the kind of the inner city black thugs who dominate the news. Seriously. Go into the neighborhoods and extol the virtues of books. Bring James Baldwin to the brothers and sisters and have them shake their indifference and ignorance. That, as a long-term project, along with strengthening families, will do more to alleviate the inequality gap than all the social programs the White House wants to ram down the throats of the American people. In other words, reverse the cultural decline and you'll turn around the social disorganization from which Charles Blow was able to avoid.