Advertisement “What’s the point?” he said. “I just wait for the movie to come out.”
His opinion is all too real and all too prevalent.
We live in a digital age. Cell phones, iPods, DVDs and Blu-rays. What hope does good, old-fashioned reading have?
There’s still hope, my friends. Mine was restored in a recent chat with 17-year-old Kaylee Knowles.
A senior at La Crescent High School, Knowles gets a lot of joy out of reading. And, as it happens, she gets quite a bit more.
“I think one of the really great things about reading is you can expose yourself to a lot,” Knowles said.
Watching television and surfing the Internet are passive mental activities, she said, and while they’re perfectly fine in moderation, they don’t stimulate the brain like reading does.
“Reading makes me think,” she said, “and I feel like it opens my mind to new things.”
What “new things”?
As it happens, things such as feminist literature — she’s reading Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” right now — and other “controversial” topics she says you’re never exposed to in school.
“The reason I was exposed to it was because I read. I just picked up a book and started reading,” she said. “Even if you don’t totally agree with it, you need to understand it.”
But why?
“I think that’s what fosters acceptance,” she said. “Knowledge.”
A lot of high school kids don’t read, or write, with any depth, she said, and she finds that scary.
Reading doesn’t just inform you, she told me, it also helps you express yourself verbally.
In an age of glib, short media writing and instant messages, she said, some people can’t even punctuate correctly.
“Punctuation and grammar are the things that help you express yourself and help other people understand you,” she said. “Even if you aren’t an unintelligent person, you come across that way.”
People should care about punctuation and grammar, she said, and if she has one particular pet peeve she wishes she could eradicate, it’s the folks who don’t know how to use an apostrophe correctly.
“I can’t even deal with it,” she said.
And, as our discussion continues, it’s clear this is one kid who knows exactly what she’s talking about. And she has the reading list to prove it.
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Knowles. Even though, she readily admits, it takes more than a little brain power to get through the modernist writer’s books.
“If you’re reading Woolf you have page-long sentences,” she said. “You get to the end and you think, ‘I don’t even remember what she’s talking about.’ You have to go back and read it a couple more times.”
When I got home I picked up my copy of Woolf’s 1931 novel “The Waves.” It is hard to read.
But, just for Knowles, I’m going to give it another try.
