Why Everyone Must Read Novels
Book Smash
I was shocked when I found out many high schoolers never read an entire book before graduating and even worse, professors in elite colleges have stopped assigning books to their students to appease their short attention span. What a crock. That’s like amputating someone’s arm and telling them it’s okay, they don’t really need it.
Reading novels is the true building of the soul. It demands our time and concentration. If we’re not practiced readers we can become practiced readers, and after that we’ll crave novels and they’ll be part of our everyday existence.
If you’re new to the journey of reading please join us. Even if you can only read a few pages a day, just read a few pages a day. Don’t make it a burden, make it a delight. The book will wait for you tomorrow to be picked up again. We’re in a time that rewards fast consumption, but that’s just fast food for the brain slowly rotting our insides. Indulge in a storytelling meal that can last a week, a month, a year.
Novels will change you, change how you think, shift you ever so slightly to see the world as interconnected through space and time. We can read the craft of a woman who wrote about Vienna from the point of view of her character in the 1980s. It’s time travel. It’s more important than reading non-fiction because we can get into the soul of that moment, into the mind of the author, and we can truly experience that life…. a life which is often not so different from ours. A life rich in imagination.
Our imaginations are in overdrive every day. We play scenarios in our heads, when someone disrespects us we may not say words out loud, but our mind is conjuring up the scene in a different way, truly showing us what’s in our hearts and souls. When we tap into that we may find ourselves sounding insane, yet we all do it. Then, when we realize we all do it, it doesn’t become a source of discomfort, it becomes a chance for true connection with our fellow human beings in the present as well as the past and future.
If this is your first time joining us I want you to know that you’ll be welcomed with open arms. If you’re reading novels constantly you’ve also found the right place. Join us fellow weirdos in this journey.
I look forward to the discussion as well as your opinions. There are no wrong opinions, when you do have opinion about a book or a piece of writing the important part is sifting through the WHY of your opinion. Why do you feel that way? That’s where the journey of the soul continues, if you know why you love a book, you’ll find others you’ll love even more. If you know why you hate a book, you’ll veer away from similar books to discover other books that you’ll fall in love with. Indulge yourself to truly connect to the work.
Love,
Tony
P.S. - I’ll write more about this in JW Kiddo, but the short version is I didn’t truly discover novels until I was 22, until I went to the library to try to figure out how not to kill myself, and as a Jehovah’s Witness teenager I was discouraged from reading ‘worldly’ books, even if they were assigned in school. I was given a book called “The Outsiders” when I was 12, brought it home and my mom threw it away immediately. What I now see has utterly sad from my growing up is now happening because college professors don’t want to assign reading novels to keep their students (customers) happy because their students never had to read an entire book in high school. Novels saved my life. Not everyone has to go through the major depression I did to get there, we can all eat from the delicious meals of the mind our local libraries have for us. If you don’t want to Book Smash with us, that’s okay, just Book Smash anywhere.