I still have the first book I ever read on a shelf. It has been travelling with us for 21 years and is a simple set of fairy tales. The best way to get someone into books is to tell him of a princess and a prince, or a pumpkin and a glass slipper adorned poor girl whose charisma wowed a prince.
But perhaps the most potent of methods to get a child into reading is to not tell him the story. Tell the child a small bit. Then create in him the curiousity to find out what's next. Let him push open the door of his own volition. Voila! A reader is born.
A book is one of the greatest companions you can ever have. Its sheer variety leaves me in awe. You can read of murder most foul, foul which is fair, horror stories and ones of tragic endings.
You can be taken to dystopian futures or ones where the machines have taken control. You can dream of slaying monsters and rescuing people.
You can also understand the world better. Why did black people get hate? What is racism? Sexism? Nazism? Why so many "isms"?
Books make sense. They take a dark world and make it light again. They also have the power to take the light out of your world and plunge you into darkness. What a device humans have made by infinite permutations and combinations of twenty six letters!
A book is the best way to discover, to grow, to mature. A person who reads lives multiple lives. As Harper Lee said through Scout,
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
Having thus concluded, I hope you understand why I must take your leave. You guessed it! There's a book to be read!
The Bilge Master
The title is kind of contradictory though. Books are written by humans. And humans told you stories and encouraged you to grow your own in your mind. It is the lives as well as the imaginations of people that are connecting with you. Books are but a medium; albeit for several centuries the most popular of such media.
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