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Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading andDaydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whetherthey might be biased. A declaration of member’s interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.And I am biased, enormously and obviously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about thirty years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.So I’m biased as a writer.But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. A charity which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals, and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.And it’s that change, and that act of reading, that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons—a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth—how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, fifteen years from now? And they found they could predict it

very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.It’s not one-to-one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something incredibly simple. Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end . . .. . . that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a postliterate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but these days, those noises are gone: words are more important than they ever were. We navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the Web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we’re reading.People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get you so far.The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books and letting them read them.I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R. L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness.There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time. You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrongvery easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.It’s not one-to-one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something incredibly simple. Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end . . .. . . that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a postliterate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but these days, those noises are gone: words are more important than they ever were. We navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the Web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we’re reading.People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get you so far.The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books and letting them read them.I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R. L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness.There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time. You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong

thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty-first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.(Also do not do what this author did when his eleven-year-old daughter was into R. L. Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying, “If you liked those you’ll love this!” Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her early teenage years, and still glares at me whenever Stephen King’s name is mentioned.The second thing that fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.You’re also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different, if they’re discontented.And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty-first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.(Also do not do what this author did when his eleven-year-old daughter was into R. L. Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying, “If you liked those you’ll love this!” Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her early teenage years, and still glares at me whenever Stephen King’s name is mentioned.The second thing that fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.You’re also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different, if they’re discontented.And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that; and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.As C.S. Lewis reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books if there are.I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in my summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s library I began on the adult books.They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on interlibrary loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and they would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader—nothing less, nothing more—which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university, about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.I worry that here in the twenty-first century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all,

books in print exist digitally. But to think that is to fundamentally miss the point.I think it has to do with nature of information.Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories—they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exabytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.Libraries are places that people go for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before—books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, a place that people, who may not have computers, who may not have Internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and Web content.A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will bebooks in print exist digitally. But to think that is to fundamentally miss the point.I think it has to do with nature of information.Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories—they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exabytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.Libraries are places that people go for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before—books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, a place that people, who may not have computers, who may not have Internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and Web content.A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be

like is something we should be imagining now.Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and e-mail,a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need globalcitizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading,understand nuance, and make themselves understood.Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round theworld, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries asan easy way to save money, without realizing that they are, quite literally,stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that shouldbe open.According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operationand Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group hashigher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, afterother factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type ofoccupations are taken into account.”Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literateand less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, tounderstand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, willbe less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be lessemployable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind otherdeveloped nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. And while politiciansblame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our childrento read and to enjoy reading.We need libraries. We need books. We need literate citizens.I do not care—I do not believe it matters—whether these books are paper ordigital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The contentis the important thing.But a book is also the content, and that’s important.Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learnlessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us—as readers, as writers, as citizens: we havelike is something we should be imagining now.Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and e-mail,a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need globalcitizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading,understand nuance, and make themselves understood.Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round theworld, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries asan easy way to save money, without realizing that they are, quite literally,stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that shouldbe open.According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operationand Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group hashigher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, afterother factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type ofoccupations are taken into account.”Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literateand less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, tounderstand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, willbe less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be lessemployable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind otherdeveloped nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. And while politiciansblame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our childrento read and to enjoy reading.We need libraries. We need books. We need literate citizens.I do not care—I do not believe it matters—whether these books are paper ordigital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The contentis the important thing.But a book is also the content, and that’s important.Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learnlessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us—as readers, as writers, as citizens: we have

obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.We writers—and especially writers for children, but all writers—have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were—to understand that truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armor and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers’ throats like

Meteorological Phenomena

The study of meteorology includes an array of phenomena with which most of us are unfamiliar, even though many of these weather components and processes affect our daily lives. For this week’s essay, select one of the terms from the list below (or, if you have an idea for a term not listed here, please run it by the instructor first). Your essay should cover a thorough description of what the term means, how it works, and what effect it has upon humans and the environment. Include one or more visuals (diagrams, photos, etc.) that make your term clearer to the reader; be sure to refer to the visual(s) in your paper. The length requirement does not include a title page, references page, or any of the visual elements present.

List of terms to choose from:

• backing and veering winds
• ball lightning
• blizzard
• bombogenesis
• capped inversion
• chinook wind
• clipper
• cold front
• contrails
• derecho
• dust devil
• flash freeze
• fog
• graupel
• haboob
• hail
• heat burst
• heat lightning
• heat wave
• hoarfrost
• ice storm
• inflow bands (also called feeder bands)
• jet stream
• lake effect snowfall
• mesocyclone
• microburst
• nor’easter
• polar vortex
• St. Elmo’s fire
• sleet
• squall line
• supercell thunderstorm
• virga
• wall cloud
• warm front
• volcanic lightning
• waterspout

Your paper should meet the following requirements:

• 2-3 pages in length
• 3-4 outside sources
• Formatted according to the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA Requirements (Links to an external site.)

It is strongly recommended that you submit all assignments to the TurnItIn Originality Check prior to submitting the assignment to your instructor for grading. If you are uncertain how to submit an assignment to TurnItIn, please review the TurnItIn Originality Check – Student guide for step-by-step instructions.

Terrorists are motivated by many things… as you all likely knew way before this class. For this week’s discussion, I’d like you each to describe one factor that can motivate a human to commit an act of terrorism.

The trick this week, is that you cannot repeat a classmate’s motivational factor… so first come first serve!

Last – please don’t just post “Xxxxx causes a person to commit an act of terror…”. Describe your factor, what is interesting about it to you, is it considered terrorism to the “terrorist”, or any other interesting angle you can conceive.