One author’s take on the future of books.

Monday’s daily “Letters of Note” was a letter from a little woman who wrote a big book.  Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote the following letter to Oprah back in 2006 regarding her opinion on books.

(Did you know, Harper Lee only wrote ONE book?)

Dear Oprah,

Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.

So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.

Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.

As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.

We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.

And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.

And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent.

Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: “What is your name again?” followed by “What are you reading?” We don’t always remember.

Much love,

Harper

I think Harper Lee’s recount of her childhood and the importance and value of books to her as a child is touching and so untainted.  Do children still have childhoods as innocent as this? I hope so.

While I’m constantly debating whether to get and iPad or Kindle, I love Lee’s sentiment towards boks and how they will never be replaced.

While I’m big on convenience and will most likely get an electronic reading device someday soon, I will never stop reading books as well. My book collection is one of my most prized possessions.

Why I want a 9-to-5 job reason #5: reading.

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”  ~Charles W. Eliot

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”  ~Mark Twain

“Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”  ~William Hazlitt

“In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.”  ~Stéphane Mallarmé

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”  ~Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.”  ~Harper Lee

Reading, like grocery shopping, is a past time, a hobby even, that I think many people do without even realizing how special it is.

I love to read.  Given my current hours, I’m trying to make more time to read before work.  But due to all the other work I’ve taken on, I spend most of my morning, as I’ve discussed, running around like a crazy person multi-tasking my behind off, not always so successfully.

As I get out of work much later at night, reading instantly puts me to sleep if I try and read before bed.

I am trying to take 30 minutes before I have to leave for work to sit down and read, but it doesn’t always work out that way.  Usually I’m using those 30 minutes to make one of my infamous make-shift lunches or tie up emails, etc. that I did not get to during the day.

Reading is, no doubt, a relaxing activity.  It’s hard for me to spend 30 minutes of my go, go, go-style day relaxing, but I am trying!

However, due to the growing stack of books in my room, the activity now even seems daunting at times!  How am I ever going to read that many books?!

How it is that I can turn a relaxing, enjoyable activity into a seemingly impossible task says something about my mental state these days and my inability to CHILL OUT.

Hence the above, said implemented 30 minute reading program, greatly encouraged by those concerned with my stress levels these days.

I keep reminding myself that I’m working towards something and that soon a sense of normalcy and some more free time will return.

The idea of coming home, cooking dinner, then snuggling up on the couch to read a book is so, so attractive to me.