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Believe it or not, people once considered reading to be a dangerous vice. Now it's "what makes America great," according to one slogan. Other book-promoting campaigns also try to persuade us that reading is sexy ("Get Caught Reading"), hip ("Get Real@Your Library"), virile and productive ("Read and Grow"), and, of course "fun-damental."The "reading is good for you" campaign is all over kids books. I'm not a fan. I know, the promotion is more for the parents, so they'll feel books are as necessary to their kids well-being as vitamins or organic milk, or whatever. I'm hearing my mom's voice: "Eat your greens." We all know how we responded to this kind of pressure as kids...
So in-your-face, so taken for granted is this faith in the healing power of literature, it's hard to believe such assumptions have emerged only in the last 50 years, postdating the development of all the other kinds of entertainment...that now compete for our time and make reading look old-fashioned in comparison. And yet, historians of mass literacy have shown, our indiscriminate faith in the act of reading would, not so long ago have seemed gloriously insane.
For much of our history, in fact, reading was considered bad for you. Books, it was long believed, had hidden powers; they could cast a spell on you. And its not hard to see why. The earliest secular manuscripts, produced long before the advent of general literacy (and often the work of alchemists and magicians), must have seemed suspiciously cryptic to ordinary law-abiding nonreaders.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
Yum! Rhubarb, asparagus, REAL baby carrots, easter egg radishes, red onions, shitake & crimini mushrooms, rhubarb tart & sticky bun (not seen), maple scone, bagette & 8 seed bread. I had to go to two farmer's markets to get the bagette and scone. Red Hen Bread is one of my favorites in Chicago and they only go to the Lincoln Park Farmer's Market (which is on the way back from our walk to Green City Market). It's been so cold here that there's been no fruit except rhubarb, so I'm looking forward to some strawberries. Have you still not been on the Internet?
I started going on it in September. I didn't really go nuts. I know people who, when their books come out, they're obsessively looking at their rating on Amazon. I would never do that. No, no, no, no. Uh-uh.
Why not?
Well, a couple of years ago, Amazon gave me a big stack of [reviews]. And I didn't know that civilians would review books. But I said, "Oh thank you so much." And I threw them directly into the trash can. Never. I don't read the legitimate ones, so I'm not gonna read -- you know, you get letters: "Dear Mrs. Sedaris, I got that book of yours and it was awful. You probably only hear from people who liked it. Well, I didn't!"
Sounds eloquent.
Uh-huh. But I don't have email because that -- my God, can you imagine? At least this woman had to put a stamp on this. But with e-mails, it doesn't cost people anything to complain.