Why Books Matter

In her Sunday Salon article this weekend, Rebecca at The Book Lady's Blog posted a link to a spectacular New York Times article on the importance book: The Medium is the Medium.

In it, op-ed columnist David Brooks cites studies that suggests that books improve student test scores, while internet access actually leads to lower math and reading scores. The first study involved over 800 "disadvantaged" students (they never explain what qualifies someone as disadvantaged) 12 books to take home for the summer for three summers. These students subsequently had higher test scores, particularly on reading tests (surprise, surprise?).

My favorite take-away from the article, besides the fact that books trump the internet in the world of making us smarter - duh - was this passage:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The point, then, is less content than medium. By giving students the beginnings of a home library, they left the world of the undereducated and started to think of themselves as readers; students using the internet are not part of any seemingly elite book-ish culture, but rather part of something that people the world around can access.

What is more, readers (in all their stereotypes) are thought of as focused, dedicated people, powering through page after page, devouring book after book. The internet, in its mere existence, encourages readers to get distracted, click around, leave one site for another (why do you think one of the metrics measured on most websites is length of visit?).

I'll admit I'd never thought of this concept before, but Brooks' article set something off in me. What qualifies someone as a "book person"? At what point do we - and do those around us - start thinking of us as book people? Where do we draw the line between reading our books, our precious libraries, and the vast, unending world of the internet? And is the world of the "book person" really so far distant from that of the casual reader or non-reader?

Personally, I believe I was born into my bookworm self. My father's house is lined with bookshelves, quite literally on every spare inch of wall on the first floor and master bedroom. My mother's house is lined with bookshelves in nearly every room, not to mention the teetering stacks of mid-read or to-read or to-gift piles of books scattered across the house. She also works in a bookstore. I, too, have inherited this obsessive book collecting gene; when I packed for my move I had 5 boxes of books and only 4 boxes of clothing. And that doesn't include the books stored in both parent's houses, or the books from my fiancé's apartment.

But neither of my siblings seem to have inherited this same gene; my brother doesn't read (either books or the internet... he's a movie/boating/anti-technology kinda hippie) and my sister reads the internet (while simultaneously listening to techno, watching television and having 3 AIM conversations. And no, I'm not exaggerating here).

So maybe it is a matter of a change in perception, both of oneself and of how other perceive us. Once I was established as a bookworm, maybe I grew into that role, and expanded it, made it my own. In doing so, I have left behind the world of the non-reader - I can no longer fathom what these people think when entering a bookstore (I think: WANT); I can't imagine how their eyes must glaze over when I go on a book tangent; and furthermore, I can no longer understand seeing the world around me without in some way relating what I see and what I learn to what I've seen or want to see in a book.