Of all the many hundreds of benefits of this e-age, one of the most joyful and under-rated ones is that of influencing the younger generation. I teach a little grade 1 student who is book-crazy. Nine times out of ten, when I ask her about any book that comes to mind, her answer is ‘oooh, I loved that one!’ The other one time in ten, it will be ‘can you write that one down on a piece of paper and give it to my mom?’
Recently, they had to build a community building in a social studies project for their homeroom teacher. She built a library for hers. It was a large box, mounted on a piece of stiff board with fake grass on it and a sign that said ‘library.’ Inside, it had those plastic row dividers from a cookie package mounted onto the wall with masking tape, for shelves. And she had made about 50 tiny little mini-books to fit on them, each of which had a title painstakingly printed on it—and they were all titles of real books, ranging from ‘My Magic Pony’ all the way up to the more edifying ‘Little Princess.’ The best part was the attic, tucked into the underside of a lopsided but admirably attempted roof. It had bits of cotton balls, felt and other soft things glued onto the sagging sides. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s so that you always have a cushy spot to go and lie down with your book.’ Cause every library needs one of those, right?
Anyway, we reached another stage in our little book dialogue today when she asked me, apropos of nothing, if I had heard of something called an Amazon Kindle which, she has heard, can hold a thousand books at one time. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, trying to restrain myself from evangelizing. ‘Would you like me to bring one in to show you?’ It’s okay, she told me. She’s seen one before. Her granny has one.
Heh. Go, Granny! And universe, if you are listening, I hope that if I have kids someday, they like to read like this one does. I’d fill up my Kindle with all my childhood favourites and be like ‘here you go, hotshot, let me know when you are done with THOSE!’ And as for Granny? She’ll be buying them the Amazon gift cards for their birthdays, because I won’t be able to afford a passion this large single-handedly. Three cheers for the next generation. I can’t wait to see what they do to the publishing world.
My grandson’s Xmas gift last year was a kindle. His little sister tried it and liked it so much she took her gift cards and purchased another for herself. And so it goes.