A book is an interpretation. I believe books (and the authors of the books)
possess the power to interpret or to assume the world as the way they see it
from their point of view. They also have
different worlds of opportunities and excitement and energy that we may not
have in the lives we were given. They
are the carriers of information to other people who don’t have the same
perspective on what life really is for them.
A book is like a teacher. It
needs readers, like a teacher needs students to teach. Without readers or students to teach, neither
a book nor teacher has a purpose.
I disagree with Joe Meno’s idea
about how a book is a place where readers have a chance to translate word into
image. I feel that the author did the
translating themselves; we are just seeing what they saw in their idea to write
the story. If they are good authors,
they will know how best to make us visualize exactly what they wanted us to,
and we will not translate at all we will directly interpret what they intended
the story to mean.
I agree, however, with Meno’s idea
that what a book is or isn’t is one of the most interesting questions in the
world. I think the reason for that is every
single book has a different story to tell, told by someone with a different
perspective than anyone else. So we are
finally getting a chance to see from the eyes of that exact person in their
exact situation; and otherwise that would have never ever possibly
happened. No two people are the same so
it is utterly impossible.
A book on Kindle, iPad, or phone is
not the same thing as a hardback book to me.
I feel that simply the holding of a book filled with pages and not a
white screen with black letters is so much different that I question whether
the electronic stories even count. The traditional
idea of a book I think was that your progress could be held in your own two
hands; not just looking down at a fluorescent page number on a screen, but you
can actually feel the difference of weight on both hands showing the amount of
progress you made. And placing your
bookmark inside, seeing the cover of the single book all hours of the day just
feels better than a multi-tasking Kindle that dies and doesn’t show you your
book until you open it. There is
something magical about physically carrying your real book, so much so that I
have honestly never read a book besides the ones made with paper!
Q: Are there any positives you can
think of about an e-book?
A: They are typically more
lightweight, you can read more at the same time, don’t have to flip the page
(such a hassle I know) and don’t have to use a physical bookmark to hold your
place. I personally believe that still
the negatives of electronic books outweigh the positives because they still
hurt my eyes, they die, and typically people don’t read more than two books at
a time which isn’t that much heavier of a load than an electronic device would
be.
Q: Do you prefer getting
information from online or from books?
A: It definitely takes much longer
to find the information you are looking for from books and encyclopedias, etc.,
but I still like to try and find as much information as I can through books
before I resort to using the internet because I find that they give you so much
more detail than an online article or news report would, and you can read the
entire book based upon the topic you were looking for and feel nice that you
know maybe even more than you needed at that very moment; but that extra
information can most definitely come in handy later.
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