The Second First Emperor: The Disappearance of the Books

The icy stare of the White Witch in Narnia is enough to make someone stop in his or her tracks. The alluring mystery of the forbidden door on the third floor in Hogwarts makes one’s hands twitch with curiosity. The sheer power of the gods at Olympus is enough to make someone shrink back in their presence. The mind is free to imagine whatever it wishes when an author describes a certain character or scene; however, books have gotten increasingly less popular ever since programs like Netflix and Hulu came out, and with those websites entering the world, people are losing the experience of reading action-packed books and creating images with the author’s descriptions in their minds. Instead of allowing people to form characters and settings on their own when a book is read, shows and movies directly place a certain template into the viewer’s head that a reader would have been able to interpret on his/her own.

Reading is significantly different from watching shows online or even watching the movie version of the book. The feeling of the book pages between your fingers, the sound of the pages turning as you continue to read, the smell of an old book, they are all the indescribable, memorable, and valued qualities that one can’t find anywhere else. Reading a book brings the reader into an entirely different world that he/she won’t be able to travel to at any other time; the unbelievable experience of reading a book is lost while watching a movie, and maybe in the future it will be lost completely. Who knows, the world today might turn into Montag’s world in Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451 (an amazing book by the way), where books are banned and burned if found. For those who say they don’t read or are born into this new age of technology, sitting down and reading a good book is one experience you cannot miss.