Changing Paths challenge day 25: books 📚

I love reading books. I love writing books. I love talking about books. I love having a to-be-read pile. I love rereading books that I have enjoyed.

A book is a little world and its characters are mirrors you can hold up, and try identifying with them to make sense of who you are.

A book is a way to visit someone else’s head. Or the front parlour of their head, anyway.

It was a book that made me realize that I am a Pagan (Puck of Pook’s Hill).

Books give you a different perspective on the world. That’s why fascists want to ban them and burn them. Books give you empathy for other people who seem at first glance not to be like you but then you realize they are human beings like you.

Never stop reading.

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My award winning book, Changing Paths, is published by 1000 Volt Press and is available from all the usual online stores. Ask your local bookseller or library to stock it!

The goal of the book is to help you decide your own path by guiding you through the perils and pitfalls of the terrain, and asking questions to help you deepen your understanding of the reasons for your desire to change paths.

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made.
Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game
“Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate—with the best teachers—the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World