You read an inspirational book that affected you a lot write a blog in about 200 words about the impact of the book upon your life and personality.
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My father read extensively since his youth. By the time I was 10 years old, he must have read thousands of books.
By the time I was 15 years old, I had already read many of the great works of literature due to the influence of my father, including works from Homer, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Plato, Marx, Engels, Kant, Schrödinger and Goethe.
Furthermore, my older sister, who got to study at Harvard encouraged me to step up my reading because “everyone there read five books a week.” While this is certainly not always the case, it motivated me to read more.
The effects books have on us is mostly invisible. Just by knowing whether someone reads a lot or doesn’t at all, you can already guess a great deal of what they are like. It doesn’t matter what kind of books they read. It matters who we have to become in order to read fluently.
Readers have a private point of view with a distinct need of private space. Readers enter an abstract world of knowledge, not observable for non-readers. Readers have a childhood because, it creates a split between children who cannot read and their parents who can. Readers at some point “grow up” while oral civilisations are characterized by childishness among all age groups. Readers are strikingly competitive, and competing against each other makes them only more alike. Readers have a vigorous sense of individuality. Readers think logically and sequentially. Readers distance themselves from symbols and manipulate high orders of abstraction. Readers have longer attention spans and the capacity to defer gratification.
Reading is an antisocial act.
Yet, the founding fathers of the United States deemed it necessary to raise the voting age to 21 years, as such a social system is doomed to fail with an uneducated public. Being educated in those days meant, reading well.
Thomas Jefferson put it this way:
“Without an educated voter, the republic cannot stand.”
He wrote in a letter to William Charles Jarvis:
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
If you take a look at the Federalist Papers and at the Anti-Federalist Papers, do not forget that these articles were published in a newspaper in the day. If the New York Times were to start writing at such a level today, they would certainly go bankrupt fast because the American public cannot and will not read them!
In brief, parents helping their children read a lot of books, are creating a sort of intellectual elite. My personal experience growing up in such a household is that, as an adult, you are much favored by business and scientific communities.