it's just a matter of time

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside. Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. You can donate to Black Lives Matter, which was founded in 2013 after the neighborhood watch volunteer who … So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. Q&A. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. And it’s this: The world doesn’t have to be like this. t’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service. I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. ‘We have an obligation to imagine’ … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need. They had no snobbery about anything I read. How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. And mental health information. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time. Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. So much for that. Beyoncé talking about her FUPA is a comfort, as if she’s just as normal as the rest of us because of it. That includes health information. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. That’s what dating is all about: finding out if two people have the qualities and compatibility to sustain a relationship over the long haul. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. Many of its harshest critics claim that Black Lives Matter’s very name is anti-white, hence the oft-repeated rejoinder “all lives matter.” This notion misses the point entirely. Tolkien’s illustration of Bilbo’s home, Bag End. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. It turns out that one of our revered Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin is the jokester who started it all. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers’ throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. I think it has to do with nature of information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. This is a matter of common humanity. A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. Librarians can help these people navigate that world. They liked books and they liked the books being read. We are on standard time 18 weeks a year and daylight saving time 34 weeks a year. “It’s a really stressful situation,” says Campbell, who suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and gastro­esophageal ­reflux ­disease. But there are very real correlations. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. More Than Just Roads and Bridges This week, President Biden unveiled the first part of his massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan... and it’s a whole lot more than just fixing roads and bridges. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. My mother thought she had gotten us to church early that Sunday only to find the parking lot already jammed with cars when we got there. Libraries are places that people go to for information. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. They did not imagine. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. Support programs that support racial justice and equality. And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. ‘It all came crashing down’: No track season for... Cavaliers make sure Birds get no party like 1999. It’s a community space. Maybe we should call it daylight wasting time since we are wasting so much time messing with the clocks in the first place. According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account”. Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. We have an obligation to make things beautiful. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. SF had been disapproved of for a long time. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure. As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults -- and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age. After observing us doing this very questionable activity for so many decades they have probably decided that we are a lost cause and pose no threat at all to their existence. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. He can be contacted at crawfordjo@aol.com. It’s distressing how many Latinos here don’t realize those things matter.” Al Diaz Racial justice protesters in Miami unfurl a Che Guevara banner this year. It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. They were good librarians. After all, it’s only a matter of time. Photograph: Robin Mayes. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. Look around you: I mean it. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. It seems more and more people are thinking about doing away with this annoying practice of moving the clocks forward and then backward so hopefully it will soon come to an end. "I think the time has come and there is a place in people's portfolio for digital assets." And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. This weekend you can just turn them forward again. Libraries really are the gates to the future. And to give them nowhere to read those books. Joe Crawford is a longtime Alton resident who writes weewkly columns for the The Telegraph. Changing the pressure of a system is another way to create a physical change. We have an obligation to support libraries. A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy, Tolkien’s illustration of Bilbo’s home, Bag End. In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. It’s Mass Radicalization. This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman’s lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. Still, using dividend payback is a worthwhile concept for framing the risk-return potential of 2 stocks. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. It was a matter of keeping up. And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. But that is to miss the point fundamentally. [Smile] was recorded at a different time. Fiction can show you a different world. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand. And reading is key. So I wanted to find out just who is responsible for this miscarriage of timekeeping that has been foisted upon us. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. I write for children and for adults. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. Other days are eaten up by errands. If there are aliens among us they must think us to be a very indecisive species. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. Literate people read fiction. To read to them stories we are already tired of. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. Looking to his predecessors, he says his next priority is infrastructure. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Thank you for a lovely meal, but it's high time for us to start heading home. We have an obligation to use the language. We show others that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Some days I get real work done. Extremism is faster, more collaborative and happening at a far wider scale than it used to, says Michael Jensen. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. This is the first time the child has encountered it. We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ‘ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs. But libraries are about freedom. Vision problems common in autism patients, County weighs adding residential properties to enterprise zones, Madison County adds COVID-19 vaccination clinics. With Liza Minnelli, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Spyros Fokas. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. “It’s just a lot more work, and you will need equipment.” Another downside is that fresh vegetable pastas can’t be stored like regular pasta, and it goes bad more quickly. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read. His reply was both simple and wise. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. I made it into the church just in the nick of daylight saving time to salvage my rite of passage in Catholicism much to the chagrin of the priest who thought I should have at least been made to suffer through his sermon. I had an excellent local library growing up. If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? It’s simple, he told me. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. And when I had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books. I disagree. And it’s all because the Apple Car is expected to become a moneymaking machine, with the Cupertino-based tech giant projected to reach the $3 trillion market cap in just a few years. "It's just a matter of time," he told CNBC's "ETF Edge" on Monday. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. To read them things they enjoy. He can be contacted at crawfordjo@aol.com. Daylight saving time was responsible for my almost missing my First Communion as a kid. A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens. And I know it's usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem. Learn more. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. 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