GRADUATE ADVICE

Teacher encourages reading

My advice for this year's graduates: become a book reader. Get a library card. Become a regular at Well Read Books and Hastings. Join or create a book club. Read at least a chapter every day.

I am not a technology-hating Luddite. I use technology throughout each day. But I know that technology is just a tool, and no tool can do everything. Texts, cell phones, and Facebook are good at connecting with people you know. The internet is good for looking up facts and images and videos. But books do something else. Words are frozen thoughts. Reading a 300 page book takes several hours over many days and (unlike a text or Facebook) puts you in contact with the thoughts of people you will probably never meet. Contrary to Wikipedia, some ideas take 300 pages to express.

It takes more than 300 pages to understand Jared Diamond's thesis about the future of our civilization in Collapse. Read Malcolm Gladwell on why ideas spread in The Tipping Point. Read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates on the famous Puritans. Meet a Roman Emperor in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Experience an ancient conversion from paganism to Christianity in The Confessions of St. Augustine. For more recent Christianity, read William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, or anything by Stephen Prothero, or challenge your mind with Cornel West. For local history, read our own Robert Ruby's history of Chief Moses: Half-Sun on the Columbia.

Read novels. Explore the criminal world of India in The White Tiger. Read The Hobbit before the movie is released. Read Maus: a graphic novel (comic book?) about the Holocaust. Read one about liberals in Iran (huh?) in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Read disturbing poetry about Hanford in Plume. Read lots of books.

Dennis Knepp

Moses Lake