Well, Oprah said it was good.

I read. I know it's not the most popular pasttime nowadays, but I enjoy it. Aldous Huxley said, "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify the ways in which he exists, to make his life feel free, significant and interesting." I agree. (I also share Huxley's disdain for pop culture.)

There is a cable channel specifically for children 6 months to 2 years. Does this sicken anyone else? What happened to reading to our children? To playing with them? The television is more than a babysitter. It has become the parent. It's no wonder our children have no imaginations. It's obvious why the test scores of our children have fallen so low. We have no one to blame for other countries surpassing us academically other than ourselves.

I worked in a bookstore and people would come in and say, "I'm not a reader, but..." How could you admit that? And in a bookstore no less. All of us who worked there had a love/hate relationship with Oprah Winfrey. At least she was getting people to read, if only because she said so. In the summer of 2005, Oprah recommended 3 books by William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, A Light in August and As I Lay Dying. They are all amazing stories, yet no one asked us for any of them. That same summer she had on that Million Little Pieces or whatever it was called. Not 30 seconds (that is no exaggeration) after the show was over, there was a deluge of phone calls asking for that book. No one wants Faulkner, a Pulitzer Prize winning author (1955 A Fable and 1963 The Reivers), but they'll go out of their way to find a book that turned out to be one big fraud. Serves them right!

Read, People, read. If you have children, read to them. There are worlds waiting for you inside books that you will never get from television. The movies will never be as good as the books! They can't be. Things have to be taken out to make the book fit into a 2 hour format. Those things are often quite important. Also, the movie forces me to see the vision of the movie makers. What's in my mind is always better.

A friend sent me this: http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/jacobs/jacobs14.html. I'm not the only one who sees the importance of reading. This site may just be the eye opener some of you might need.