Week 26
When one spends one’s leisure reading, it’s like taking money out of the bank account.
Date: Jun 22nd, 2020
Motion: THR the bookwormy past we come from
Role: PM (gov.)
Finnish author Jörn Donner was known for his slogan in the 80’s, “reading always pays off”, which was used in the commercials of the nationally then 2nd biggest bookstore chain, with Donner sitting in a chair like a latter-day FDR and uttering these avuncular words. Mr. Donner was chosen for this role partly because he had always been an avid reader, with a book collection that was always the hardest part to move whenever he moved between quarters, consisting of boxloads of books.
Mr. Donner is no longer with us, having passed away during the winter this year, and surprisingly the most topical book about him now is one written by his estranged love-child son in Sweden, Otto, whose book Vildhavre, meaning a weed variant of oat in reference to the verb phrase “sow one’s wild oats” and how some children are legitimate and entitled, whereas some are considered mere nuisances, tells the book- and celebrity-hungry public about the social awkwardness and baggage that comes with being the illegitimate son of a bookworm father.
I haven’t read a single one of the books that Mr. Donner wrote himself, but I could consider reading the illegitimate son’s memoir, as it is available in two languages at least so far, and it would nicely jog my proficiency in the other one. I’m all for precision-reading and singling out some special books to read intensively — rather than spending weeks, months, years and decades reading just about anything extensively. In the following, I’m presenting my arguments why reading books is NOT the best thing that one can do with one’s pants on.
Books Need to Fulfil More Requirements Than Just One
If we grab a book, the experience cannot be just skin-deep. Reading information-poor text for hours and pages on end is futile and tiresome, if not a health hazard. The books we read would preferably have a very rich informative content that we can use in our adult lives or alternatively a very rich fictive or philosophical content that we can equally usefully use in our adult (or imaginative) lives (if we are in a creative profession). In addition, the book might be read in a foreign language to jog our language instincts, since we get preciously little language exercise once we graduate from any of the schools we ever went to. Because every picture tells more than a thousand words, we would also benefit from reading autobiographies or biographies that typically have a middle section consisting of black-and-white or colour photographs snapped along the way.
Once Adulthood Has Set in, We Can Theoretically Let Go of Books
One of the great reasons why children and teenagers (aged 3 – 21) read books is that they WANT to KNOW what it is like to be an adult. Because real adults never tell them what it really is like to be an adult with an adult’s freedoms and responsibilities, they try to gather that wisdom from books on their own and on the sly. That’s why we see these precocious bespectacled youth biking to and from libraries with their satchels filled with borrowed books that they are returning within a week or two. They are desperate to know adult life from all possible angles, and who the better ones to teach them than adult authors in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, their productions bulging with juicy details about sordid lives and telling anecdotes about dreams, fears and triumphs, not to speak of uncannily accurate descriptions of exteriors, interiors and personalities. For all that, once we begin to have that a posteriori knowledge of our own, dirty and down to a tee, the importance of books begins to ebb, and once we start correcting politicians’ deliveries and speeches in parliament, we know that we are adults and we don’t need no introduction to that anymore. Conversely, if we see people who read voraciously when they are already mature, we can postulate that they do not feel like adults yet.
Second Reading Is Necessary for the Content to Sink In
Reading books is useless in the sense that most of them are read in childhood and teenage as outlined above, and their contents are forgotten in adulthood, as the distance to that first reading experience is fading fast and the brain is already filling up with gigabytes of new data on this and that. Any book that we have read would seriously benefit from a 2nd take, and that take should occur in adulthood. When we read a book for the second time, we notice the author’s adult style, funny references to contemporary culture or events, his or her habitual word usage, period aura and things we generally speaking omitted the first time around. It is also this second time that makes the book’s true content stick with us, as we can no longer forget something that we have read twice. The bad thing is that very few of us have the privilege and possibility to read books twice, with several years between the two instances. Time on our hands is not simply enough to allow for this to happen. So, in the best of cases we read a random book once in our lives.
I have presented you with reasons why reading is NOT that fulfilling, fun or rewarding on closer inspection. Reading is not as useful as you might think, while writing is not as difficult as you might think. These days, anyone seems to be capable of writing crime fiction, formerly called detective stories, but that capacity obviously doesn’t spring from experience in self-taught crime or police work — but, rather, hours spent reading crime fiction. Many of those usually academic authors had an entirely different layman’s day job before they ultimately became full-time authors. Reading enough makes for a graduate school in writing as well, for the better and for the worse. There is definitely a lot about books that makes reading them not such a no-brainer that librarians or the intelligentsia would have you believe at first.
Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Ensimmäisen puhujan pitää ottaa lava haltuun, ja näin se lava otetaan. Perspektiivin täytyy olla riittävän laaja ja selkeä, joten ei ole fiksua alkaa saivartelemaan esimerkiksi e-kirjojen ja tavallisten kirjojen lukemisen välisestä erosta tai keskittyä internetin vaikutuksiin luku- ja kirjoitustaidoissa ja -tavoissa. Aihe ei tästä tyhjene, sillä parille ja edustajalle jää tämän jälkeen mahdollisuus tarttua esimerkiksi huonoon kustannustoimittamiseen tai siihen, miten korkeatasoisia sivilisaatioita on osattu pitää pystyssä ilman luku- ja kirjoitustaitoakin.
Polar Ice Standpoints Society 