I Believe in Reading Second Essay

When I started writing this paper I was going to just talk about books and reading Then I got sidetracked so this paper is more about books vs. the computer and books and the computer combined as learning tools.

Reading is very important to enrich a person's life. If you can read you can learn anything. You can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. Books can open a world to the past, the present and the future. They can also take you to fantasy lands that never existed in the real world. Through books you can experience what it is like to be an explorer, you can go to the moon and outer space, you can live with cavemen, you can experience what it was like to be a pirate in the 1600s. You can give yourself an entire college education with the books that can be found in any public library. For an example John Aristotle Phillips was born in 1955 in Connecticut. In 1976, while attending Princeton University as a junior undergraduate, he designed a nuclear weapon using publicly available books and papers. Books are very cheap entertainment. Used books can be purchased for a dollar or less. Many famous people learned things from books rather than in a structured educational environment.

Today you can use the internet to enhance your reading experience. I have read several books that led me to the internet because I wanted to know more about some of the things or people mentioned in the books. Other times I have written down words I didn't know the meaning of and looked them up on the internet for my own education and to improve my vocabulary. Several years ago I read Almost Adam by Petru Popescu and Neanderthal by John Darnton. One of the books mentioned a Sherpa guide and I googled him to see if it he was an actual person. He was and when he died in an accident a few years later and I saw his name in the news I knew who he was. Sometimes when I'm reading and I go on Google to look up a word or a name I end up spending several hours or longer following links to other pages or sites. Sometimes it's amazing where you end up. Googling a Sherpa guide can take you to Big Foot. Then you end up going from Big Foot to pages about the supernatural. Or the links might take you to the biography of one of the first people to climb Mount Everest and you end up reading history about the Victorian Age. And all the time you're having fun reading the book and looking things up on the internet you are actually learning something.