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Timothy Johnson's avatar

I'm going to take up your challenge of arguing that "life" is objective. (Though I've never actually read Charlotte Mason, and I suspect my take on this isn't going to agree with most of her fans.)

I think your claim that "of course" life is not objective comes from an attitude of pluralism. And I agree that we all have our own taste, so every book will appeal to some people more than others

But the definition that I like is that a book is living if there's a community of people anywhere who are actively using it to organize their lives and their worldview.

By that definition, many books that violently disagree with one another can both be living (for example, Karl Marx and Ayn Rand).

But whichever side of the debate we fall on, the existence of a community on the opposite side makes it a valuable exercise to read their foundational books, if for no other reason than to understand them better.

And that applies even if the books in themselves are poorly written by most literary standards. If anything, that should only deepen the mystery of how such a book has inspired so many people.

The ability to write elegantly crafted prose is a useful tool, but what really matters is whether a book changes how people live. Given how few books achieve that goal, anything that does survive is fascinating, regardless of how it gets there.

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Danielle Martin's avatar

There are a few elephants in the room regarding decline in literacy/reading, especially framed by online pandemic instruction, but the one whose absence strikes me the most is the disappearance of the reading parent. It’s not enough to scour Google for what other people deem to be “living books” and proffer them to your kids hoping it’ll be the key to their love of literature. I was an avid reader as a kid because every day my dad came home from work, played with us, ate dinner, and then spent his evenings trying to get as many pages in of a novel before his attentions were called elsewhere. My mom spent her mornings reading. My parents kept books in the bathroom so they could read during their few moments without four kids demanding attention. I didn’t want to just read books for my age, I spent hours poring over their books (75% of which I would consider unpalatable today) trying to get into their heads and figure out what made them so interesting to my parents. It wasn’t the quality of the books that made me a reader, although I found plenty that were vivid and powerful to me, it was watching someone else read every day. Kids naturally want to do what they see their parents doing, for a time at least.

None of this is to shift any blame to parents, and especially now that I am one I am awed by the difficulty of engaging in creative or personal pursuits beyond raising kids. Parents have less time than ever to spend with their kids. I was incredibly lucky to have reading parents and I hope I can be one for my son.

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