um, like, ya know

When Jon and I were in a cab in Boston over Memorial Day we listened to a radio talk show host share excerpts from a recent commencement address given at Boston College. On May 18, 2008, David McCullough, author of books such as 1776 and author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning John Adams, spoke on The Love of Learning. He urged the students to make the love of learning central to their lives and encouraged them to "read, read, read!"

I am glad I grew up in a home where the same importance was attached to books. We are all readers to varying degrees; Mom is the slowest, Amy is the pickiest, Dan is the walking Encyclopedia. In addition to reading to us from before we could hold our heads up on our own, Mom and Pop didn’t like us to spend the summer in idle splendor so we were always enrolled in summer school, and when that was over and chores like painting the fence, picking rocks out of the dirt to lay down grass, and tearing up the roots of two large trees Pop had cut down at the end of the Spring, were completed, or it got to hot to be outside, we had book reports to write. Mom would take us all to the library in Healdsburg, as much for the air conditioning as for the books, where we’d spend an afternoon browsing the shelves. One summer Pop paid Daniel and I five dollars a piece to read all 500 pages of Mexico by James Michener.

I guess that’s why whenever Summer comes around I go on a reading binge. One summer was the glorious Summer of Steinbeck, last year I read nearly all of Twain, and this year I’m vacillating between American History, and classics I missed out on in High School; McEvoy, Mort, Lehrman I’m talking to you. (Langford gave us free reign so it wasn’t his fault if I didn’t read as much as I should have.)

At any rate, when McCullough said, ““Make the love of learning central to your life. What a difference it can mean. If your experience is anything like mine, the book that will mean the most to you, books that will change your life, are still to come. And remember, as someone said, even the oldest book is brand new for the reader who opens it for the first time,” I immediately began to wonder what the next book to rock my world would be. I’ll let you know what I find.

Addendum

His speech also had a great bit about the disrepair our language has fallen into. This was really the radio host’s point in mentioning the address on the air. Check it out on page eight of the link above.