A Tribute To Books

                This new generation can’t help but look at me in amused puzzlement as they see me day after day reading books. Their eyes study me as their mouths question me. To them, a book can’t compare to the movies. A book can’t compare to television shows or computer games or talking on the phone to your friends.
         To them, reading a book is just a mundane chore that has to be done every now and then when the teacher demands it.
         How can I explain a book to them? A book is not just pages with words. A book is the guide that takes you to unexplored worlds. A book is the door to the threshold of undiscovered universes with thousands of different worlds to investigate. The book is the golden door and reading is the silver key to open it and step through.
         Saying a book is just pages with words is like calling the Mona Lisa a painting constructed by lucky brush strokes and random colors. It’s like calling an orchestra performing a symphony a series of well-timed burps and farts. Saying a book is just pages with words is an insult not deserved, is a crime against the authors and readers worldwide, a crime against originality and imagination themselves.
         Books are ideas that fuel the car that carries your thoughts. Books are the worlds that are in your dreams but can’t remember when you wake up. Books let you experience the wind rushing through your hair and gently caressing your clothes even though you are curled up in bed. Books let you explore places like Paris or Madrid while you sit at your desk and tune out the gray words of your teacher. Books provide you with the quintessence of love so you know where to set your standards. Books take you out of your home and into thrilling adventures that gets adrenaline rushing through your blood and your heart racing. Books are your time machines to bring you back as far as when dinosaurs walked the earth and lived. When you hold a book, know that you hold imagination in its most physical form.
         And who is to say that I am lonely when I sit in my house alone and read? As says a dictionary: a person is the individual personality of a human being. So when I am reading Don Quixote, isn’t he a person through his fantastical beliefs and his blindness to reality? I’m not alone when I sit on my couch next to the lamp light in this hushed house. Don Quixote is there, present the moment I started to read. When I read Romeo and Juliet, my heart sings in jubilation as they declare their love for each other, and in the end my heart weeps the same salty tears as Juliet when she finds her love is dead. Am I alone, or am I with Juliet sharing her grief? Books provide the bridge to meet new people, whether they be undoubtedly crazy, angelically innocent, grossly unsavory, wildly heroic, or terrifyingly evil.
         But there can be more importance from a book if the reader looks for it and recognizes it for what it is. A book, when being written and when published, is like the cornerstone of the writer’s soul. The writer’s personality, their feelings and thoughts, their very being, is like a ghost behind the words I read. A poignant sentence strikes understanding into my heart, another piece of wisdom that I didn’t have to learn on my own—the writer told it to me through the words they had so carefully constructed on the page. Every book has little hidden messages that lie like gold nuggets between the lines, put there carefully by the authors in hopes that someone out there will reach for it.
         Maybe I overvalue books. Maybe all these words that I poured out like hot tea before it cools were all just empty words with pretty verbs in the middle. But while someone may call a sunset a yellow sun going “down”, a book would describe it as a fiery ball of distant flames that slowly, reluctantly disappears beneath the horizon’s belt but defiantly leaves rays wriggling like neon snakes until they vanish. While someone would call the ocean blue, a book would say that the sun’s rays were bestowed upon the turquoise water, creating diamonds on the surface and sending long shards of light into the depths of the ocean to make it look ethereal in appearance. Looking at the world through a writer’s eyes and through a book’s cover, the ordinary and mundane events in our lives can be beautiful once again and worthwhile to take a few moments out of the day to appreciate them. 
         No, books are not just pages with words. And what’s more, the adventures, mysteries, loves and discoveries that I find on the book shelves in the local libraries have also inspired me to find them in reality.