Yeah, it took me all of 30 seconds to come up with that title. Cool, huh?
Anyway... I find I'll be writing a couple posts on literary topics. One's today, the next is tomorrow. I find both issues fairly saddening and alarming, and I feel it's important to write on them. First, the one that the title's about.
There lives, in the town of Kansas City, MO, a man who likes books. He owns a used book shop that, until recently, sold books to the masses. His sales have been taking a downturn, and he had accumulated a fair number of books that no one had bought in a long while. He decided to donate them to other local thrift shops and libraries. He was quite alarmed to find that none of them would take them, because they too already had too many. Thus, he decided to send a very clear message about what he calls "society's diminishing support for the printed word." He started to burn his books.
At first, the Kansas City fire department put out his fires because he had no permit. He's planning on getting one, and quick. It seems that no one wants books that much anymore, or printed words in general. The Internet, though it is quite useful, has completely broken down the need for printed words. Why read a book when you can read everything on a screen? Better yet, why not just download an audiobook?
Personally, I find it appalling. I'd never burn a book, unless it was so against my principles that I deemed it to be evil. I've never found any books of such a type quite yet. But I'm truly saddened that a man would need to go to such a length to send a message like this. I like books. I really enjoy reading books. I like online stuff too. I find, however, that if anything I read online is longer than about a couple pages of text, I become highly disinterested in it, and have to work at reading it. It's not just online things, but anything I read on my computer. I have a couple full books on my hard drive that I've never read, because I can't bring myself to read a book on my computer. There's just something about holding a book and turning the pages that makes a huge difference in the experience. Clicking a mouse and pressing arrow keys just doesn't compare. Merely picking up a book and flipping through its pages arouses feelings in me that I can't describe. Scrolling down a wall of text just doesn't do that for me. Having books stacked on a shelf and being able to look at them can give me a similar feeling. I like books, what can I say?
But I seem to be in the minority in today's society. Books, and it seems literary education in general, seem to be going downhill very quickly. I'm a victim of this downturn in good literary education as well, as evidenced by this list:
It's a list of 100 words that all high school graduates should know. I'll be honest, there are quite a few on that list that I've never even heard of. I know many of them, have heard others but am not quite sure how to use them properly, and don't know others at all. The bottom line, however, is that I don't use very many of these in everyday speech. Perhaps in writing... but still, not that often. But I'm in college now, and apparently I should know these. This is what the dictionary writers say, at least. What can I do?
This is just to illustrate the problem of lowering literary standards. Knowing all 100 of those words, at least to me, seems to be a bit much. After thinking about it, however, it seems that a lot of those books that are being burned in Kansas City have those words in them. No one reads them, so no one knows the words. Perhaps no one knows the words, and that's why they don't read the books. Either way, it's a sad state of affairs.
So, read more books. Tomorrow I tackle Web 2.0 .
Posted by Shenlon at June 3, 2007 12:01 AM