A few years ago, a friend of mine who toils amid the crumbling machinery of our nation’s educational system asked me to contribute to a project she was doing on the subject of books. I don’t remember exactly what was the purpose, but the general context was something along the lines of “why books matter.”
Which made me have to think about why books matter.
I mean, I knew why books matter to me. They matter to me for the same reasons, I suspect, they matter to a lot of people. They entertain me. They educate me. Nonfiction books tell me things about the world I live in, while — to butcher a quote by whomever, I can’t remember — fiction books show me true things about the world by telling me lies about worlds that never existed.
So, sure. Yeah. Of course.
But why do books Capital-M Matter?