The more I think about books the more amazing I find them.

Take these two. I haven’t opened them yet but I know their pages will be filled with lines of print, and that as soon as I begin to read them I’ll be transported to places and times of which I know barely anything. I also know that if you picked up the same books you’d travel to the same places, and the worlds you’d find would be similar, but not identical to the ones I find. And both of our discoveries would be different to the ones the authors set out to describe, but we’d all experience an exchange of ideas, and ways of seeing the world.

That’s the strange power of reading. Hopefully we’ll never be without it, nor the time it takes to understand words. Video and voice are tempting, and better suited to our fragmented lives, but it would be such a loss if they drowned out the time it takes to read, to think, to care, and to try to understand where we are heading.

If we lose all that, the only writing left might be the writing on the wall.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023