A Culture Of Reading

19 January 2022

At some random mommytown-suburb train station… a book exchange. Free. Take a book to read on your journey. Bring it back. Swap it. Leave a book. A culture of literacy. I’ve spotted little temples to thinking like this in England and Wales, in big cities and small towns. Imagine being a kid growing up around a culture that loves books like this… you have an advantage of several hundred years of moral, intellectual and technological development – compared to a kid that knows only screens, glamorized gangster subcultures and exposure only to the cognitive frameworks of political activists. God have mercy, you’ll NEVER catch up. The little kid can go explore worlds. Grandma can have a magazine to page through. The student can escape her nerves with a thriller or a romance. The business man can remember what it feels like to feel, away from the spreadsheets for a few brief pages. A little bit of everything. A little something for everyone. A beacon of illumination in a barren intellectual wasteland of a world.

Peter van der Walt is a fiction author, although you may find some non-fiction and the odd essay out there. Fans can find his newsletter, posts, updates and developments at petervanderwalt.com. Currently, he is hard at work on his next story. When not writing, he has far too many interests to reasonably keep up with. He lives with his partner in Devon, England.