“Better minds have said it before, but I don’t mind repeating it less well again and again: Reading, like the natural world, is good for people (though clearly at a very different level). Pace Levis-Strauss — books are good to think and books are good to be. Books have unique affordances — do things that other media cannot do as well, or at all. Reading books exercises our imaginations (which we will need to break the mind-shackles our overlords are fitting us for); reading books offers us opportunities to expand our ability to connect; reading books encourages the trickster force within, which is play. Right now there’s a whole museum-movement built around staring at a painting for ten minutes, excellent in and of itself, but books hear this and they're like, Ten minutes?! Hold my Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster! Books command our attention for hours, days, weeks, months, years — sometimes for whole lives. Reading books regenerates our ability to focus, to stay mindful. Screens do certain things very well, but collectively what they do best is naturalizing the hysterical reactive lizard logic of our capitalist vampire-squid hegemons. They convince us that to be alive is to capitalist vampire-squid all day, all night. Reading is the zafa for that particularly unbearable fukú. Reading leads us away from the Sunken Place of neoliberal capital, back to the Slow Zone of human thought and human feeling. The Slow Zone where all that truly matters for prospering — deliberation, moderation, imagination, compassion, resilience — is possible. Books are a Slow Zone oasis that can reawaken and sustain us through this age of digital decimation.” ReadingImaginationBooksMindfulnessPhonesScreensThoughtDigitalFeeling Author:Junot Díaz
“But even if it turns out that reading books is on the downhill side permanently and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop that extinction, I find nothing wrong with fighting the good fight all the way to the bitter end. Nothing wrong with fighting for a dying arts without quarter or surrender. Sort of like fighting for a dying planet to the bitter end. To speak only of books, it’s not a fight that hurts anyone, and it is one I seem built for — to sing the song of reading never tires or demoralizes me, no matter how poorly the battle goes. My love of reading, I guess, holds me to the task. And my optimism born of the fact that I belong to a community that never should have survived enslavement, and if we survived against all odds — not only survived but prospered — what else might be possible in this rapidly tilting world?” ArtFightingReadingBooksOptimismPossibilities Author:Junot Díaz
“I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.” ReadingBooksSurviving Author:Junot Díaz
“The librarium — the sum total of what reading represents and does — is strong. Read with any consistency and you will be succored, you will be reconstituted and, if you hang tough enough, you will eventually be transformed. Without fucking fail.” ReadingBooksTransformationSuccorReconstitution Author:Junot Díaz
“Because that’s the thing about reading / books. For all their vulnerabilities and lack of pull relative to screens, reading / books has proven resilient as fuck.” ReadingBooksScreensDigitalResiliency Author:Junot Díaz