“A home without books is a body without soul.” --Marcus Tullius Cicero

The world without books would be mass chaos. Even though, I, myself, don’t really read for pleasure, everyone reads to learn. If we didn’t have books, how would we know what people tell us is true? If there is no written record, couldn’t someone simply just make something up and tell others it’s the truth? How would anyone be able to challenge this “truth”? We rely heavily on books as far as education is concerned. We begin to recognize letters and numbers at a young age, and begin to read in first grade. If books didn’t exist, it would be it difficult to learn these simply things. We wouldn’t have books, but would we be able to write and recognize words? While reading, people often build their vocabulary by seeing a word they are not familiar with and looking it up. If books didn’t exist, I believe we would be “dumbing down” our society. For one, as mentioned, it would make teaching nearly impossible, it would be hard to reference things, and our vocabulary wouldn’t be as broad as it is with books.

Personally, I wouldn’t miss books, but as a mentioned in one of my peers’ blog, in the future, I feel like it will be a hobby I will pick up. However, I have enjoyed reading Feed and Hunger Games, but if they weren’t required in our reading, I can’t say I would pick up either of the books and read it in my spare time. On the other hand, if we didn’t have text books for college, I would be completely lost. I like to read before lecture so I know exactly what the professor is talking about and I like to be able to reference the material. At this point in my life, I can’t really see myself “breaking” the law to try and get my hands on a book if all books were banned. 

In today’s society we do “burn books” everyday. We burn them by reading SparkNotes and by watching the movie counterpart to the book. I’m sure everyone has used SparkNotes at some point throughout their education career. I used to SparkNote everything in middle school and even in high school. For me, it was much easier to spend the time reading the summaries, the plot, and the character analyses, rather than spending the time to actually read the novel. I discovered that even though I spent the time reading the material on Spark Notes, it would have been more beneficial to actually have read the novel. So once I started college, I began to read everything and said good-bye to SparkNotes. Another way we burn books is by watching movies that are based off the book. A lot of people would rather watch a movie instead of reading the actual book. The problem with this is that sometimes things are eliminated in the film that happened in the novel and sometimes the movies are much different than the books. For example, I actually read My Sister’s Keeper and then the film came out a few months after I read the book (this is one of the rare exceptions that I read a book for fun!). Since I had already read the book, I knew exactly what was going to happen….until the end. In the film they “killed off” the other sister! They completely changed the whole ending and who died. I was outraged! 

As you can see, books (even if we don’t want to admit it) do play an important role in our society. They record important things regarding laws, and government documents, educational material, entertainment (reading in spare time), etc. It would be hard to determine what was actually true in society because everything would be verbally passed down. And we all know from playing the telephone game, that when the secret gets to the end, the statement that was made in the beginning is often changed drastically. We need to stop “burning books” in our society, and take advantage of the opportunity that some other places do not get the privilege to have.