If you are lazy to read books…

Our childhood was in the countryside. A book at that time was our wish, the happiness of childhood behind the bamboo fence of the village. At that time, news, literature, music, general science knowledge... everything came through the loudspeaker hanging at the entrance of the village. Luckily for us, in those days, the youth unions in the countryside often had their own bookcases, and we kids could borrow freely on the condition that we kept them carefully. If we let the books get wrinkled or dirty, the woman in charge would twist her ears and forbid us from borrowing. The first story I read was Tam Quoc Chi (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) by a cadre who evacuated the village when American planes bombed it. Even now, decades later, I still remember the illustrations clearly.

Photo: GC

When I was away from home studying in Hanoi, to look up documents for my essays and graduation theses, the only place I could find was the library. Find the necessary books or magazines, choose the information I needed, and write it down on a “postcard”. The familiar image at that time was students either staying in the library or borrowing books to a deserted place, diligently flipping through them and taking notes. Reading books to forget the endless hunger of students, we happily distorted the sentence in the ancient Chinese poem: “All professions are lowly, only reading books is noble” (!) , meaning that all professions are lowly, only reading books is noble (!)

Around the 90s of the last century, when the country had just opened up, people began to get used to the image of “Western backpackers”. These tourists carried huge backpacks on their backs, confidently appearing on every road, with a Lonely Planet travel guide in their hands. The owners of motels, food vendors … shook their heads in defeat at these tourists when they charged higher prices than the instructions in the book!

Then the situation changed when the Internet was born. On November 19, 1997, the Internet officially entered Vietnam. Since then, the more technology develops, the more urgent life becomes, and people have less time to read books. Therefore, on February 24, 2014, the Prime Minister signed a decision to make April 21 every year Vietnam Book Day. Then, to make reading culture more widely popular, on November 4, 2021, the Prime Minister decided to organize Vietnam Book and Reading Culture Day, replacing the previous Vietnam Book Day.

In my personal opinion, despite the numerous creative activities of localities to arouse the passion for reading, the number of readers seems to be decreasing day by day. The habit of reading is still a luxury in this very fast-paced life. Printed newspapers are shrinking at a frightening rate, the best-selling novels, the authors who won the Nobel Prize for Literature … publishers only dare to print a few thousand copies at a time. Bookstores now sell all kinds of goods, equip cool free reading rooms but rarely have customers.

If that is true, then it is only natural, because each era has its own requirements. Today's digital transformation era cannot force people to bend their backs to find documents. The entire treasure trove of human knowledge from A to Z has been digitized, available online, and can be used and learned about with just a few simple steps. That Lonely Planet book has long since become a memory, because everything needed when traveling is available on the phone...

So, it is not surprising that people read less books. The world's classical authors are just memories of an old generation. The young generation today has bad handwriting because they are used to typing on computers, and it will probably be more and more difficult to express what they want to say, because their vocabulary from reading is too limited.

It is a general trend, hard to resist.

MERCURY

Source: https://baokhanhhoa.vn/van-hoa/202504/neu-co-luoi-doc-sach-10b4e07/