Our reading affair
May 3rd, 2013
By: Gina Yoryet Roman
On March 5, 2013, David Toscana, Mexican writer, born in Nuevo Leon Monterrey, wrote an appalling and shameful, yet thought-provoking article titled, Mexico: “El país que dejó de leer,” - “The Country that Stopped Reading.” Toscana’s thoroughly detailed article, narrates the ugly truth of Mexico’s reading literacy in which I can clearly see his point.
As a long-term educator, I face that reality on a day-to-day basis. That is why one of my requirements is to have my students read at least one book in each course taught. It is generally difficile to persuade a great majority of my pupils on the grounds of their attitude towards reading. Mr. Toscano better describes that apathy in his writing, “The population is so aliterate -- not illiterate, just apathetic about reading and writing. (This spills over to Mexican-American population).”
His points are well backed up by all the evidence mentioned, nevertheless I’d have to disagree (maybe I haven’t done my homework yet) because I now see more people reading than before. At least some of my clients, people I work with, or a few friends, plus all the students at ASFG (and all the American Schools in Mexico) where reading is required. All grade levels from elementary to High School, if I am not mistaken are required to read one book a month.
In addition to that, AMSOC in Guadalajara, and The American Legion in Ajijic, are two of the inviting libraries that encourage the community to read. Toscano states, “México, país que otro pudiera haber sido considerado como bien educado, ocupó el penúltimo puesto, de 108 países en un sondes conducido por la Unesco sobre hábitos de lectura.” Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment or reading habits a few years ago.”
This is true to such degree, we come at a very far end but I am hopeful that things will change for better. One of those determining factors is, Libreria Gandhi who launched one of the best reading campaigns by far. One of my favorite billboards all over the city, is, “Menos face, más book.” This library´s campaign, the annual FIL, Feria Internacional del Libro - International Book Fair, El día Mundial del Libro - International Book Day, held on April 22, and other events, are slowly but progressively puslling us away from the penultimate spot.
Therefore, Mexico’s reading rate will soon look up, despite our illiterate and aliterate leader that gives our country and fellow country men a shameful name to the world.
That ‘leader’ of ours reminds me of ‘me’ when I was a teenager. I was part of that high aliteracy percentage and a mirror of the aforementioned man until I decided to engage into a reading affair. Since I developed a love for reading, I’ve never stopped nurturing that habit. Sometimes while reading, I take a short break and think, “How could I have let so many reading years bypass me?” “Let’s do the math and calculate how many books I would’ve read by now. I need about fifty lifetimes to be able to read all the books I want.
Things are very different nowadays. I am proud to say that I am now part of the minority group. I read every chance I get, about a million different topics, I read with and for a purpose. The first reason is because I feel incomplete without reading, and the second one, because it helps me become a better writer, plus I get to see all the wonderful works of marvelous writers. I witness how they play and make magic with their words.
All those countless writers are the right fuel to keep me drawn to reading, that’s why. I want to continue reading all my life because “Every book is a Victory,” Pablo Neruda, Poet, and I will no longer be an aliterate.
“A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.”
No two persons ever read the same book.
–Edmund Wilson
There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.
–Josh Jameson
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
–Author Unknown
Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.
–Vera Nazarian
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
–Woodrow Wilson
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
–P.J. O’Rourke
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
–Harold Kushner
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
–Author Unknown
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
–Haruki Murakami
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.
–Elie Wiesel
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
–Maya Angelou
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
–Northrop Frye
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
–G.K. Chesterton
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
–John Steinbeck
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
–Gilbert K. Chesterton
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
–Salman Rushdie
Are we not like two volumes of one book?
–Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
–Maxim Gorky
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
–Umberto Eco
In a good book the best is between the lines.
–Swedish Proverb
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
–Marcel Proust
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
–Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
–Beverley Nichols
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.
–Edward P. Morgan
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
–Oscar Wilde
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
–Ernest Hemingway
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
–Henry David Thoreau
Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
–Jeremy Collier
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
–C.S. Lewis
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
–George Bernard Shaw
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
–Abraham Lincoln
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
–C.S. Lewis
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
–Henry Ward Beecher
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
–Amos Bronson Alcott
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
–William Styron
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
–Michael Cunningham
I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
–William Lyon Phelps
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
–Oscar Wilde
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
–Joseph Brodsky
What you don’t know would make a great book.
–Sydney Smith
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
–Paul Sweeney
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
– Marcel Proust
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
–C.S. Lewis
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
–Ezra Pound
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.
–Jeremy Collier
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
–J.K. Rowling
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
–Joseph Joubert
It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
–Judy Blume
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
–Toni Morrison
A good book has no ending.
–R.D. Cumming
No comments:
Post a Comment