Today I'm grateful for books. You thought I was going to talk about how super-grateful I am for grandma's huh? Well, you're wrong! I mean, you're right in that I am super-grateful for grandma's, but they'll get their day. Oh, they'll get their day.
Anywho, books. The two of you who know me probably don't know that I actually do have a nose, though it's usually pressed nicely into the spine of a book. My love of reading, and therefore love of smooshed noses, came from mi pap. I was but a weee lass when he indoctrinated this insatiable need to be constantly reading. He read to me when I was a little girl, and as time went on, he would pay me $$BIG BUCKS$$ to read a book, and then write a report on it. We're talkin' TEN DOLLAR BILLS here folks.
My very first REAL chapter book was "The Giver" by Lois Lowry. And the list goes on for twenty miles from there.
I am so grateful for books. They're a transport into another world. Reading Rainbow says it best: "I can go anywhere! It's in a book so just take a look…" They work my brain out. They teach me new words like "brooding" and "crux" and such. I like crux. I envy writers their imaginations, their fortitude to sit down and put on paper on the evil going-ons in their brains and then let hundreds of thousands of people read them.
Like Stephenie Myer. Wasn't she worried that people would be thinking "What a crazy psycho-sexual woman this Stephenie Meyer woman is!"? I mean, not that I thought that or anything…
I'm grateful for the women of the 18th and 19th century who were witty and funny and feisty and didn't care what the "man" thought. They wrote some of my favorite books. Like "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" and "Anne of Green Gables" and "Wuthering Heights". Books like these will probably never be written again because there just aren't women like these women anymore. We're all too "feminist" and "let me pay for my own dinner pig" and "who needs to write a book when I've got TIVO" sort of chicks who don't shave their armpits or wear bras. Ok, that's mostly me. Regardless.
I'm grateful for the men in the same era who had social and political stances that were potentially dangerous to their lives, but they went ahead and made note of the times. "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas, "A Tale of Two Cities" by Dickens (though it was written by an Englishman a couple of decades late…so his life really wasn't at risk for his opinion, he was just depressed and angry…) and "Les Miserables" which I was FINALLY able to finish and am still depressed because of it. I learned a lot about French History from fictional novels. So there Mr. Wood! And I must throw in there "The Phantom of the Opera", because, to me, that's one of the sweetest love stories ever. Edward and Bella have nothing on Christine and Raul!
I love watching my children grow to love and appreciate books. They're only 2 and 3, but already they lie in bed and look at books and try to read them. Cohen makes up his own stories; he's so creative, so imaginative. I've even given Brett the "book fever".
I think about "1984" and "The Book Thief" and all the horror of piles of books burning. Gone. What we lost in the fire, indeed. I hear that Junior Highs have band "To Kill a Mockingbird". This is beyond me. PTA 2010 BEWARE!
Books are an amazing blessing. They give us an interesting look into history. Not just the going-ons, but what the people were like, what they thought, their opinions. Just like the Beatles who wrote passionate music about their views, writers all over the world in every era have left us amazing footprints and insights into their world. "The Book of Mormon" and "The Bible" are amazing books with a history of world and creation, truth and knowledge, good and evil, love and hate. I'm so grateful for these books above all, because they give me the most important knowledge.
So take that and smoke it in your pipe "BIG BROTHER"!
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