Books.

book (bk) n.

1. A set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers.

2. A printed or written literary work.

I have a love affair with books, but it's a flawed affair in a lot of ways. You see, I, like many others, have a tendency to cheat on the tales that lie between those endless pages by flipping on the television, or by surfing the internet until I want to gouge out my eyes, and everything after is awash in that LED afterglow. I've been known to cheat on book reports by renting the movie version, or reading the SparkNotes as a main source, rather than a supplemental resource. No, my relationship with books has not been exclusive, nor have I even tried to make it so. But the thing about books? They're always there, welcoming me back with beautiful stories and words of comfort.

They were my first love. For as long as I can remember, I was enraptured by the written word, voraciously reading every that I could get my hands on. My favorites, as any young girl would have told you in that time, were The Baby-Sitters Club series (I wanted to simultaneously be Claudia and Mary Anne at the same time) and the Nancy Drew series. Thrown in for good measure were the classics, Little Women and Heidi. One of my absolute favorites, though, one that I read over and over and over was Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Over and over I would read this book, always anxiously awaiting the last chapter, which I would read two, three times before setting it down, happy in my dreams of ancient Egypt.

As I grew older, though, my passion for books waned. I became consumed with wonders like the Internet, basic cable, and socializing with friends. I skimmed books in high school, relied heavily on SparkNotes, and basically became bored.

CNN today had a snippet about how the average teenager spends their free time: three hours per day are generally spent watching TV, an hour and a half are spent on the internet, one hour spent on playing video or hand held console games, and a mere thirty minutes per day spent reading any sort of medium.

While a part of me was surprised, there was that other part that shrugged it off - it seems our generation is constantly in need of being illuminated - and not in the intellectual way. We spend our days with lights dancing before our eyes, entranced by the simplified stories, cheap laughs, and ridiculous portrayals of human drama, believing every word. The words are never quoted as being important or meaningful, or even terribly insightful. The lights are there solely to entertain.

It used to be, not so many years ago, that a diverse and expansive library was the pride of every wealthy, well-read family. The bound volumes were cased in their own rooms, and important first editions were shown off to guests; inscriptions on the front covers told stories in themselves, and each library told the story of its owner. What about now? How many people even have bookshelves, let alone whole libraries?

Could it be that books are becoming outdated?

But then, even books are being subject to this futuristic version of the world related in visions and descriptions of the past. The Amazon Kindle takes away the feeling holding a book open and replaces it with a razor thin, dimly lit E-book. The feeling of a book in your hands, flipping through the pages, or skimming a couple of pages is gone. Just like the iPod took away the experience of opening a new CD, examining the album art and putting the disc in your player, thereby removing some of the connection between listener and artist, the Kindle removes the connection between reader and author. While both the Kindle and the iPod offer easier, more convenient methods of storage for their intended media, they offer little experience. Convenience is not experience, and experience is ten times the actual intrinsic value that experience has.

When I finally switched my major from Communication to English, I began to actually read - I took in the experience, the accomplishment of finishing a difficult novel, and the words themselves. The experience of reading was far more rewarding than an hour of television, or time spent on MySpace. I now keep a book with me at all times, tucked away in my far-too-full hangbag. That feeling alone brings me comfort.


What am I reading now? The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain.