Oklahoma is a young state with a long literary tradition. It's the home of Ralph Ellison and S.E. Hinton and Louis L'Amour and N. Scott Momaday, and the inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath and that god-forsaken heart-rending tear-jerker Where the Red Fern Grows that every young child has his or her soul quartered with in elementary school. My first legal, taxable job in life was working for the local county library on the plains when I was 15. I made minimum wage but they let me have any overflow book for 25 cents a paperback and 50 cents a hardcover. I was in lust. That was a redefining experience for me. My uncle used to sign his emails with a quote from Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit that said "His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs." That's an agreeable representation of my uncle. I hope people can say things like that about me when I'm older.
I'm afraid my love affair, however, is being jeopardized by an increasingly less-literate culture. A quarter of the United States had not read a book in the past year at the time of a 2013 Huffington Post poll, another quarter had only read between 1 and 5 books. As with all aspects of education, Oklahoma is experiencing this deficit acutely.
They say libraries are dying. That's a disingenuous misappropriation of responsibility. We're killing them.
I'm afraid my love affair, however, is being jeopardized by an increasingly less-literate culture. A quarter of the United States had not read a book in the past year at the time of a 2013 Huffington Post poll, another quarter had only read between 1 and 5 books. As with all aspects of education, Oklahoma is experiencing this deficit acutely.
They say libraries are dying. That's a disingenuous misappropriation of responsibility. We're killing them.