Last night I organized my own TV night. With my remote, snuggled up among the cushions, I began looking for something interesting. I stopped to listen to an interview with a sociologist who was talking about our times.
Behind the handsome sociologist was a bookcase packed with books neatly lined up. So I got lost in my thoughts… I wonder if the sociologist had read all those books stacked behind him?
That’s the dilemma!
It’s well known that people don’t read anymore. Books, the ones we find in bookstores and libraries, have become too long and pedantic. If all goes well, a person can concentrate on reading an article on social media for a maximum of two minutes. It’s emblematic that online newspapers list the reading time next to each article. Seven minutes is the maximum time we can give ourselves to catch up on the day’s events.
The question is inevitable: when do we find the time to read a book?
People have lost their love for reading, alas!
Raise your hand if you have a book on your bedside table or under your pillow…
Step forward if you’ve read at least one book in the last month!
If I had a little courage, I’d like to address the crowd, perhaps from Hyde Park Corner, trying to revive their passion for great stories. Those stories that only paper books with slightly yellowed pages can tell.
Dramatic stories, adventures, and love stories aren’t read in seven minutes by scrolling back and forth on our phones. To enjoy a book, we need to hide our phones, forget about WhatsApp, find a comfortable armchair, and find a story that captivates us. How wonderful it would be to reread Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” with the naiveté of a child of the 1970s. Yes, because it requires ingenuity: no Hollywood special effects, no artificial intelligence creating all sorts of scenarios, but only Verne’s profound and essential words, which transport us back to the simplicity of an enchanted world.
And if you don’t like adventure? Then I’d recommend Natalia Ginsburg‘s wit and irony.
I’d lose myself in the pages of “Lessico familiare“, where every sentence, every description, every word takes me back to the informality of domestic conversation and the daily life of those times. I let myself be carried away by the feeling of nostalgia and melancholy that reflects the memory of the past and creates an emotionally charged atmosphere.
And if I want to overdo it, after finishing “Lessico familiare“, I choose “The Desert of the Tartars” by Dino Buzzati from my library; I immerse myself in the metaphor of the desert, a symbol of the absurdity of life and the expectation of an event that seems never to arrive. I lose myself in the evocative and poetic language, in the detailed and dreamlike descriptions, in the sense of anxiety and melancholy.
To ensure this dissertation is not wasted, I conclude by recommending “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea“, “Family Lexicon” and “The Desert of the Tartars” to my young students at Daisy, Holden, and Pascal.
We could organize a reading marathon, meeting occasionally to discuss our texts. This could be a way to rekindle the lost thread of a love of reading, just as one brings the tail of a kite back to earth.
Nicoletta Coppo
