I’m probably not the best person to represent our class in a speech. I’m not someone to jump into the middle of things. I’ve always been more comfortable on the sidelines of the Class of 2015, sitting off by myself with a book clutched in my hand. While many of the people on this stage visited Cape Cod for our senior trip, I was reading The Grapes of Wrath and taking a pottery class. That sentence pretty much tells you all you need to know about me.
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But before I get into the meat of my speech, perhaps I should tell another story – an older, more nostalgic one. Everyone likes a good kindergarten story at graduation, right? When you get to the age of attending kindergarten, one of the most exciting new privileges you get is the weekly trip to the school library. On those trips, we were each allowed to pick out one book to take home. Most kindergartners would take home picture books – A is for Apple or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I probably should have, but I didn’t.
No, every week my kindergarten class went to the library and I picked out a Nancy Drew book. I took it home and spent every waking second reading it so that I would finish it in time to pick out a new mystery at the next visit. Now, remember, I was in kindergarten, and Nancy Drew was far, far over my head. I had somewhere around a two percent comprehension level when it came to the stories. But I could read them. And that, of course, is what mattered.
I wanted everyone to know that I could read all the words in a Nancy Drew book because I was a very pretentious child. Looking back, that is a little embarrassing. And once again, that pretty much tells you all you need to know about me.
Knowing that I am the kind of person who skips trips to read a book and chose books in kindergarten I didn’t really understand, the topic of my speech probably won’t come as much of a surprise. As long as I have the chance to give my classmates a little piece of advice, I’ll take the opportunity to say this: never stop reading.
When I say that, some might be tempted to roll their eyes. Many people stop reading very early on. Some people never even start – they’ve never read a book they didn’t have to write an English paper about. They’ve never read a book they enjoyed, and so in some sense they’ve never really read.
But most of us here, I trust, read. For those of you who do read, keep reading. For those of you who haven’t started yet, start. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power – and there is power in books. For centuries, books have been the matches which light fires of incredible change. They’ve inspired political and social movements which have shaped our modern world. Take a trip through history’s long list of oppressive governments and you will find that many of them burned books. But as Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
I could go on and on about why the end of reading would be the end of our generation, but we’re not going to let that happen. Of all the inspiring things I thought about saying, encouraging you to keep reading struck me as the most inspiring.
I know a lot of you on this stage haven’t liked a lot of what you’ve read. And I get that. I’ve read books which have made me miserable. Reading them was tedious torture. My only motivation to finish some books has been the school projects I had to complete – and, like many of you, sometimes I still didn’t finish them. I gave up on certain books. But I never gave up on reading. As James Joyce once said: “Life is too short to read a bad book.” And the person reading gets to decide that.
If you’ve only read bad books so far, I beg of you, keep reading. You just haven’t read the right books yet. The right books for me won’t be the right books for you, and vice versa. But there are books out there that you will enjoy. I’m sure of it. Five years ago, Google estimated that there were over 129 million books in print, and there have been plenty more published since then. With so many books, there is something out there for everyone.
And when you find the right book, it’s a truly transcendent experience. Books change you. They make you think. There is nothing in this world quite like the feeling of losing yourself between the walls of a novel, of finding yourself again in the last lovely line of a poem, of closing a book and realizing you are a different person than you were when you opened it.
I wish you luck in your future endeavors. I know you will do well. You will do even better if you keep reading. But there’s more. Reading is a great goal, but you can take it one step farther. Don’t just read. Share. Tell people about what you are reading, and inspire them to read. When you meet people who say, “I don’t read,” tell them that you do. Help them become a part of a generation who is well-informed. Help them be part of a generation who reads. Read to your children when you have them. It will give them a tremendous head start in life. Children whose parents read to them do better throughout their time in school, which leads to greater success in life itself.
As for me, I will always belong in the pages of a book, tracing the sacred ink with my finger and leaving a piece of myself behind with every turn of the page, and making sure I tell others of my journey.[/private]