Booking Through Thursday – what’s the use?

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme in which we answer a question about books or reading.

This week’s meme is:

I am paraphrasing from a friend’s Facebook wall her question:

“How would a teen-age boy who is going to work with his hands ever use Literature of England in his work?”

The age-old “How am I going to use this in real life?” question. How would you answer it?

Here in Norway the question would probably be about Norwegian literature, but the answer would be the same.

Everything you do and learn has a part in making you the person you will be. Literature make you see other people’s point of view and make you think differently than you did before. You get to live other people’s life, they might be fictional but there’s always something to learn from them. Reading literature also feeds you imagination, taking you into situations that you would never have dreamed of on you own. Discussing a book with someone else who has also read it teaches you even more of this.

It also show you different ways of using the language, it’s more than a tool for writing contracts, bills and ads.

Also, you will be more in you life than your job. You will relate to friends, family, colleagues, you boss and strangers you meet along the way. Reading literature will make you a more well rounded person to be around.

These are the sensible and grown up reasons and I’m not sure the work-with-his-hands teenage boy would appreciate them, so I do have some other reasons. Reading literature and learning all the other “useless” things that you are required to learn (becoming the well rounded person that school and hopefully you parents try to make you into) will: Make sitcoms funnier because you’ll get more of the jokes, make other tv-shows and movies better because you get more of the references, make news make more sense because you know the background and geography, make other books better, make comics funnier or more profound…and so on.

Also, learning and doing all these things make your brain better. Brains are nice that way, the more they are used the better they get. That certainly won’t harm you when you are doing your job, whatever it might be.