Quit faking your literacy, and actually pick up a book

Editor,

Consume! How will you defend buying that cup of coffee this morning, the hamburger at noon, the cigarettes for your afternoon, or the TV dinner you plan on eating alone?
You have consumed an entire world of food, and I will bet that you haven’t consumed a poem or a book just for yourself in months.

You are too busy with your WebCT homework, your cute geology tutor, your five-paragraph essay due in three hours. In your free time, you check your Facebook and the news, hoping some disaster has struck that will make your life meaningful.
If anyone asks you what you’ve been reading, you reply that you’ve been far too busy to pick up a novel. The only things you write are your name on quizzes or pointless papers in which you use big words and long sentences to make your professors think you’re learning.

I ask you to take up a novel. Do not avoid literature. You run from it!

You only visit your libraries to use the Internet. You go to the bookstore to buy sweatshirts and calendars. Why, you don’t even bother reading the clever things your peers chalk on the ground!
You’re concerned that your mind will get a taste of knowledge and begin growling for more. And what’s far worse than this: You say that Catcher in the Rye is your favorite book even though you haven’t read it since 11th grade.

Even then, did you really understand it? Did you think Holden Caulfield was the cool dude you wanted to emulate? How impossible!

Put your training wheels back on. Begin at the beginning. Find an old copy of Winnie The Pooh so that you can lose yourself in the writing without worrying that it will take too long or be too difficult for your overworked mind.

Better yet, read Dr. Seuss. Remind yourself of the joy reading gave you.

Read it out loud! Read it to your friends, to strangers, to yourself.

Don’t substitute a good book with a YouTube video of raccoons in a bathtub. Don’t waste your time gossiping or quoting the latest celebrity-gone-insane.

You are worthy of reading.

You spent years learning how to make the written word form a voice in your mind.

Let it out. It is honorable to find yourself procrastinating homework for a good book.

Garden your mind.

Chelsea Worthington
UNM Student