The Joy of Reading

I have a confession to make- I have never been the avid reader of books that my friends and acquaintances often assume me to be. Don't get me wrong- I love to learn and to read, but I probably only read an average of 6 or 7 books per year on my own volition.  Most of the knowledge I've acquired about the world has come from words not printed in books, but posted on the internet. As much as I might like for it to have, my intellectual journey did not start by my reading one of the "Great Works" by authors like Plato, Shakespeare, or Milton, but by my having an open mind, an abundance of curiosity, and access to the internet (and, more specifically, Wikipedia- which I will vociferously defend against attacks on its reliability to this day). The consequences of the fact that my generation and each one after us will grow up with easy access to pretty much any information we want will continue to play out over the course of the 21st Century, for better or worse (I for one think that more information and openness is almost always a good thing), but it is a fact for which I am most grateful and appreciative. Had I been born even twenty years before I had, and come of age in a world devoid of the world wide web, I probably never would have made the effort to figure out the answers to questions as simple but important as "why did Europe go from being almost all monarchies to almost all democracies?" or "how did we go from being almost entirely farmers living in the country to having all the diverse occupations we have today and living in cities?", and would have spent my life in some mediocre and boring existence rather than the exciting one I have chosen today as an aspiring writer and public intellectual.

Now before it seems that I am telling my fellow young people that it's okay to not read books and only look things up on the internet, I want to clarify myself: while my journey didn't start with books and I still don't read as many of them as I would like, I made the one's that I have chosen to read count. Over the past four years, I've read Dante's Divine Comedy, Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the great dystopias Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, The Great Gatsby, Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Federalist Papers, and of course all the books that I mentioned in my previous post which were assigned to me in my "Theoretical Foundations of Modern Politics" course last semester. Reading those books exponentially deepened the knowledge of politics, history, and even basic and timeless issues dealing with the human existence like love, that I had first gained and found a passion for on the internet.

Two days ago, while on my return flight back from Amarillo to my collegiate life at UT-Austin, I picked up a book (it was Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from the aforementioned Theoretical Foundations course) for one of the first times since I left college for Christmas break six weeks ago. I don't know why it's so easy for me to allow my passion for reading books to atrophy when the reading is not assigned to me, but atrophy it does, and my mind suffers for it. This year, taking the "baby-steps" approach, I hope to increase my reading output to no less than one book every month, with an eye towards increasing that number to two books a month in 2013. While the internet is fabulous and I'm obviously a big fan, there are just some things that you get from reading a book, taking notes, and underlining important passages from it, that you can't get online. The sooner my generation (myself obviously not excluded) realizes that fact and acts on it, the sooner we demonstrate the internet's true potential- it's ability to get people's feet wet with knowledge, so that they might feel comfortable wading into deeper sources of it.