E-Kantipur

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read” Abraham Lincoln, one of US’ greatest presidents, said. I want to read every book ever written, every book “I ain’t read”. I would go even further and say that books are my best friends. No, I am not crazy or lonely; I have just experienced some of the greatest things life has to give through books. Through Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, I learned the ritual of bedtime and the importance of saying goodnight to the things around you. Through The Runaway Bunny also by Brown, I understood the power of a mother’s love. Through Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man I travelled to another time: New York City during the time of Prohibition, gangsters and private detectives with top hats. I devour books; I read them with the open eyes of a child and yearn for more. There was a period here when I was reading one every day, sitting on the roof of my flat in the hot Nepal sun.

This past month, Amazon.com, the online book and media seller has sold 180 ebooks for every 100 hardcover books. This breaks my heart as books have been such a huge part of my upbringing, my childhood and my adulthood. My mother was one of the founding members of a community library in our town. After we moved to Wisconsin, she joined the Library Board in our town for nearly a decade. She fought religiously for the rights of every citizen to have access to books, knowing the importance of reading for a human being’s development. My childhood was focused around books. The Easter Bunny brought books, the Tooth Fairy left books in exchange for teeth, and my evening ritual included at least one book being read to me. Being read to is an unparalleled pleasure I have enjoyed into my adulthood. I learned to read on my own at the age of three. The world opened from that moment and has continued to open wider and wider with each book I have read, each unknown place I have experienced. There wasn’t a television in the house until I was almost a teenager.

This idea of ebooks is a concept that is foreign to me, and thus, unwanted. I love holding, smelling and touching books. There is something important about creating my own reality through ink stamped on a piece of a tree. The reward of enlarging my imagination can be seen in the art and theatre I have created, the situations I have braved instinctually despite never going through them and in my ability to still be able to play. Reading a book on a digital screen holds no appeal to me. All of us spend enough time on the computer these days, whether at work or at home. Our eyes need a break from the digital blur they see daily. I want to spend my leisure time with a book, a physical book. Books are like old friends; each time you read you learn something new, you smile and you cry. Unfortunately, whether on a screen or not, a lot of Nepal’s children do not know how to read, and therefore cannot have that friend in a book.

Nepal’s literacy is listed anywhere between 48 percent and 84 percent, but I suspect it is closer to the lower figure. A literacy rate of 84 percent is quite optimistic as the rate for women’s literacy rate in the early part of the 2000’s was around 28 percent. I have seen most literacy rates listed at 55 percent. That means much of Nepal’s population doesn’t have the option to escape to a new place, to witness situations they wouldn’t be able to, or to use their imagination to its full capacity through books. I was lucky to be taught and encouraged to read from an early age. Yet, here in Nepal, for a lot of people there are many more important things than wasting time reading, as there is work to do. But I believe a right of every child is to read, and a majority of these children here in Nepal aren’t granted that right. Even with work to do, they are children and should be granted the right to read and to educate themselves through books. In the US, the literacy rate is around 99 percent, but we have worked hard to achieve that rate.

Nepal faces large discrepancies between the rich and poor and the urban and rural in regards to literacy, making it harder and less accessible for certain populations to be able to read. We shouldn’t give up on our children so easily here, children that drop out after grade one surely won’t have the literacy skills to make them successful adults in this contemporary world. We need to work to provide for the children of Nepal, to provide them with the tools to better themselves and to encourage them to have an imagination. And we can do that through books. Giving children the knowledge and tools to read, we also provide them with a lifelong outlet, a lifelong asset and even a friend. As Ernest Hemingway said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

hannahglilly@gmail.com

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