Weekend Lounge ~ How to Read!

Welcome to the weekend!

I hope you're doing well. It's getting cold fast around here, and boy am I tired of the weather already. It's only December too! We still got a whole season ahead of us.

Not much of a post this week with the holidays swinging around soon, but I wanted to put this one out regardless. Given that books are ostensibly the main subject of the blog, or at least very adjacent to it, I wanted to take them on in today's post. It's also been a fairly consistent topic in a lot of circles recently, so it's probably time to focus at least a little on them.

What makes reading so important? You've almost certainly heard it was at some stage in your life, and it's almost just as certain that whatever reason you were given chased you away from reading instead of towards it. Why is that? We should consider that.

We have a lot of questions to ask before we can get answers.

Why you should read classics? What even is a classic? Do they exist? Why do they matter? All of these are important queries to ponder, though they are rarely asked even by those in charge. These are valuable questions that don't tend to get answered these days, or if they do they tend to be stock unsatisfying ones that have led to the current widespread literacy problems we've been suffering since the end of the 20th century.

I've made plenty of jokes about how when I grew up the Boomers in charge made reading seem very unappealing or lame, epitomized in the infamous "Chicken Lover" episode of South Park with the bookmobile guy. If you're old enough, you remember that stereotype he embodied. That joke character is the exact stereotype that turned reading from a hobby into being a social issue and punchline, and one that made it lacking in all excitement and masculinity. This is the key reason males of my generation and younger drifted away from the medium.

Of course it didn't start there: Golden Age Siffy Fandom hated masculinity, as you can see reading literally any article on the subject from the time, but it was a logical conclusion to make. The "Chicken Lover" character is no different from the pencil neck degenerate who hated Edgar Rice Burroughs and seethed over Ray Bradbury getting attention for writing the wrong stories. In fat, they are basically the same character. 

The parting with masculinity and males was a long time coming, and even when the industry had a lifeline with books like Goosebumps or Harry Potter that actually did appeal to males, the publishers went out of their way to shake that potential base as soon as they could. In the process, the audience has fled and to this day has no interest in coming back. As a result, OldPub has labeled itself as anti-male, in that males deliberately keep their distance from it. You can argue with the verbiage or their intentions if you want, but it is clear that they did it to themselves by choice.

That aside, reading has been dying for a good while. Something must be done to stop the hemorrhaging. However, that is only half the problem.

The other side of it is the question of how we bring people back to reading? That is what we must ponder. It's not a simple task and it requires a lot of work to answer. One thing that won't work, however, is finger wagging and making mandatory book lists of the sort that chased the wider masses out in the first place. The primary goal should be to make reading exciting and engaging, and that means finding and highlighting exciting and engaging books that do more than check boxes. In NewPub, there is no shortage of work being published that does this. The issue is more in finding it in the typhoon of books out there. In OldPub, the problem is backwards: there is much uninteresting material being pumped out, and it is extremely easy to find. Getting that straightened out should help the confusion and help the space grow.

The above video on learning what a classic book actually is and what it should entail is a good way to understand how to read in a world where reading is frowned upon. Well, unless we are discussing fanfic (and that will be for a future post), and the like. The fact is that there are a lot of reasons to read, and the classics can give you all of them at once. This is why they are classics and why they should be seen as the goal of the medium, something to aspire to beyond the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, the way they've been taught has not only damaged their reputation, but also the process of reading altogether. And what this hatred of reading has lead to a society that simply can't and doesn't want to read or process entire segments of knowledge that were once common not that long ago. This bad way of teaching is responsible for the destruction currently plaguing not only the entirety of the arts and entertainment sectors, but all of society itself.

As can be seen here:

This wider problem is not improving, and it will not until true value is placed on literacy again. This is because it turns out that reading is important, but not for lame and embarrassing Baby Boomer reasons like "magic" or "imagination" (though you don't hear those hoary tropes anymore, as if they meant nothing to those in charge to begin with), but because it is actually important to form us as people and a society. Literacy is a non-negotiable, as we're quickly rediscovering.

Reading is important to process the world around and above us, the universe inside and outside, the long gone past and the upcoming future, and each other. If we cannot do that anymore, then we are destined to implode inside ourselves. The world we inherited will lose everything we were supposed to carry on and leave us barren. If that happens, then all of this we have gained from our ancestors will have been for nothing. We're already losing important parts of ourselves for no good reason, and at this rate the next generations having nothing to start with will only make it more difficult for them to build on anything or succeed.

Current ways are simply not working.

Of course none of it is hopeless, but the amount of time being wasted clinging to dead industries and mechanisms that no longer (and probably never did) work, is holding up any real change in a direction we need. Instead we linger in talks about endless IPs, meaningless trope checklists, and how to wring more money out of dwindling audiences. None of these address the issue, and we all know it, but for whatever reason the conversation keeps circling around to them over and over.

True change starts from the bottom up. The base is what has to be build upon. Why is this hobby, this art, and this medium, important in the first place? What makes it so valuable, and why do we need to treat it more seriously? Why does all of this matter in the first place? We need to figure that out before we lose even more of our reason to create at all.

We're ready now. It's no longer the '90s and cynicism and overbearing sarcasm is finally dying, as is the irony poisoned sincerity that was big in the '00s. We have a path forward out of this pit at the bottom of this endless cycle we have been trapped in for so long.

Now to take it.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I'll see you soon.

Mysterious radio waves... Alien civilizations... Monsters in the Old West... Dark sorcery... 14 Tales of Wonder!