Sofia Sabah, Period 8, 1/11/22

 Modern Mythology 2022 Sofia Sabah, Period 8, 1/9/22

Topic: Literacy and Learning

I remember in either elementary or middle school we would have to write monthly book reports, and we always had to get the book approved by the teacher. Many times our selections would be denied. Perhaps it was too “below our grade level”, or that comic books didn’t constitute real literature, and so we would result in choosing a book out of the teacher’s own library. It's always been frustrating to choose a book in regard to whether your teacher will think it's worthy enough. I wish I could go back and tell them that I’ve gained more from a manga than from their assigned summer reading books. That being said, Neil Gaiman’s article Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming, which we read in the beginning of the school year, is an article that I feel is so important for many others to take into perspective. He makes a claim on how important reading fiction is and enforces the idea that children should never be discouraged from reading “bad” books. According to Gaiman, reading fiction is what encourages you to think of and exchange new ideas that are outside the box, build empathy, and to always strive for more. If we tell children that they shouldn’t read a certain genre, they are going to grow up reading literature that they find tedious and lifeless and never learn which types of books they enjoy, thus, growing a hatred of reading. Something that really stood out to me the most while reading was how Gaiman said that discontent and escapism are good things. He says that, “discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.” I constantly find myself drifting away into different realities within my head. Daydreaming has always been negatively connotated to a bored kid in math class, thinking about what they’re going to do when they get home. But dreaming is so much more than that- it intrigues your imagination and forces you to strive for more, to achieve those very dreams. And none of this is possible without fiction. How can our future generations make the world better than it was before if they have no imagination?

Works cited:

Gaiman, Neil. “Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming”. October 15, 2013