Thursday, December 6, 2012

Day 341:What Are You Reading?

Seek knowledge
and you will be known

What Are Your Reading?

There was a time long, long ago, when one was greeted with the following questions; “What are you reading?” “Who is in your cd player?”
Now, I know that most young folks don’t even own a CD player and instead of books they read Tmblr, but there was a time when people bought an entire album, not just the song they liked. Back then boys and girls, some people read entire books.
That thing called a library was the result of an idea of one of the founding fathers of the United States. A guy named Benjamin Franklin pooled his books with a group of young thinkers who called themselves the Junto so they could learn together and share their impressions and ideas.
Ben hired the first librarian and developed the idea of a subscription library in Philadelphia where information would be accessible to all people.
I used to tell folks that if you want to hide something, put it in a library.
“What are you reading,” is still an important question to the people who want to find even more to read while reading the reader.
It also tells you something important about the person asking the question.
Nowadays, I just ask, “Do you read?” I usually hear something about how much time there is in a day or how there are just no good books. There are more good books then there are serious readers.
I’ve written it before, but I feel the need to write it again; what you put in you is what comes out. Make sure that you feed yourself with complete, researched ideas that have a beginning, middle and end.
An album is a story; sometimes it’s based on a concept of the artist, and sometimes it tells the story of the creation. Wanting only bits and pieces of an idea is like trying to eat only the eggs from a cake.
If you have more shoes than you have books, your mind is begging you to sit down and read.
If you have thousands of songs, but not one complete album, you are missing out on what we used to call the “B” side of life. Sometimes the song on the flip side of a 45 (yes I’m old) was meant to be a throwaway, and yet it became the hit.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you seek after it.
Be you, be well, PLEASE be a reader, a listener and a host of other good things.
Bertice Berry, PhD.

1 comment:

  1. I'm reading One Letter at a Time by Dick and Rick Hoyt with Todd Civin. Rick Hoyt is a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. His dad and he have "run" 1,072 marathons together since 1977. I contributed a chapter because I was Rick's art teacher in the early 70's and I remember him well. It's a story of courage in spite of adversity.

    ReplyDelete