Appreciating Books

[caption id="attachment_100632" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Google.com"][/caption] APPRECIATING BOOKS (Moze Simanjuntak, 13 years old) How well do you appreciate a book? Imagine a book; quite advanced with no pictures. You can find these types of books within good bookstores; I’ve found some in Kinokuniya and Times. These books are very educative and very cheap (Rp. 30,000,00 for a single hundreds-of-years-old book!). But as I’ve observed for 3 hours reading in Kinokuniya, none are bought. Those who looked usually frowns and put the book not on the shelf where it belonged. A few times I see people going out bookstores without a book bought; instead, their plastic bags are filled with stationaries or notebooks or pens. Some even went out buying nothing (Yes, I’m serious). It seems that people in general nowadays underestimates their luck in having such access to knowledge and learning. Yes, perhaps some simply did not find the books they are looking for. Perhaps some needed stationary. But how many people these days looked at books for knowledge? In general, it seems to me that not many does. How many people in general searched Wikipedia and truly read it instead of copying randomly and pasting for some school paper (C’mon, be honest). I’ve met people that doesn’t even know that there is a country called Afghanistan, or that there is a World War II (Rich brother and sister (14 y.o and 13 y.o respectively) living in a hotel resort in Bali), or someone that claimed if you put enough pressure on coal they turn into pearls (supposed scientific article in the internet) and a lot of people that does not know that stars are humongous balls of gases on fire (three are adults). We do not know how lucky we are to have books so easy to access and buy these days. Years ago, people make copies of books by hand. Imagine an entire set of scrolls that Homer wrote; hundreds of thousands of words on parchment. Now we can simply copy an E-book, paste it in Microsoft Word, and read it (Print it if you like). Books are purged and burned in the middle ages, educational books that politicians and churchmen dismissed as “heathen and vile”. Do you know about the alchemysts? They are the scientists hundreds of years ago. Do you know about the Illuminati? They are a sect of scientists that the Catholic church hunted and killed brutally (to make an example of them; for example burned or branded with red-hot steel). Please appreciate books. At least don’t think of them as too expensive (think about writing one with 200,000 words by hand and selling them for, say, Rp. 50,000,00). Try to but them to improve another language, learn history and science. And (for students, mostly) if you have a project that requires Wikipedia’s assistance, read the entire article. Reading improves language and grammar. Reading improves reading speed (so you can read more in a short time. They’ll pay off, I assure you. The effort is worth it. You’ll be able to read 1250 pages in 2 days; that’s my record. And I know you can do better than that.). Thanks for reading this article. And please appreciate books and articles. Moze Flavi