For parents of seniors (and anyone else who wants to do a student a favor)
As graduation looms on the horizon, it’s time to consider a little gift for your son or daughter that won’t break the bank but just might remain memorable after the last relative departs and the last helium balloon takes flight. For a mere $10.00 pick up a copy of Anna Quindlen’s slim little paperback, How Reading Changed My Life and tuck it in among the electronics and the bling. When your student opens this little package, quietly suggest these mere 70 pages plus a lemonade are a good way to spend a lazy summer afternoon. You’ll both be glad you did.
And seniors, consider Ms. Quindlen’s words: “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time, described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.” Happy reading!
May 12th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Many thanks for the suggestion, Ms. Herrnstadt.
I appreciated the quote, and am sure I will enjoy the book. Ms. Imray