Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Books Will Save You

There is no greater joy for a parent than seeing your child read a book. My girl reads. My job is done.

No matter what happens, I know she has a place to go. That she has found the magic of her imagination. That she can enter new worlds without the aid of any tech. That words have found her. She has found her inner voice, and in doing so tapped into the voice of others. Deep, long, vast knowledge. Stories can save us. I am a true believer.

I don’t go to church. I go to the library. It is my reverent space.

I’m watching my youngest slumped on the couch. She has never been an overly academic kid. In fact it took her years to find reading. She used to complain she couldn’t get past the first page. But something changed. And now it’s part of her.

She doesn’t read for homework. And she isn’t reading books from the school curriculum. She’s on her own reading adventure. She tells me she wants to read the classics. It actually makes me cry. To myself of course. It tells me that she is going to be ok. She has found home. The place I found at her age. The place that taught me about myself. About other places. About culture. About love. About growing up. About dying. About joy. About conflict and suffering and most importantly about forgiveness. Books taught me how to think. They taught me about my own story. They showed me how to care for people I don’t understand.

They made me a better person.

There was this beautiful moment between us when I gave her the first book that changed me. I was 13 when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harper Lee book about racial prejudice and social justice. I was growing up in a town that felt like it could have been in the deep south, with an Aboriginal sister who I witnessed experience the most terrible racism. Even though the book was set in another country, I understood it. It helped me make sense of what I saw. Of my part in it. It started a conversation that I had never previously had, and that frankly, I haven’t stopped having.

She read that. We had conversations about what happened. I was blown away by her observations. I recalled the note she left as a little girl of 6 or 7 on her door that told people that ‘this was Aboriginal land and if they didn’t agree they weren’t welcome in her room.’ I love that note.

I wondered if she’d enjoy The Great Gatsby. I didn’t read that until I was studying literature at university, and it haunted me. The deep themes of illusory happiness and the perfect capture of the shallow ‘American Dream’ is weirdly resonant for where we are culturally at now. The dark narrative that lies beyond the beautiful image. It reminds me of everything unsaid on Instagram. She read Gatsby too. And she got it. It occurred to me that I could do some amazing parenting just by passing a book.

Yesterday I found her finishing the last pages of The Catcher in The Rye, the 1945 Salinger classic, about a teenager struggling to come to terms with the complexities of growing up amidst the inauthenticity and double standards of the adult world. She’s 15 in 2024. That book was written almost 80 years ago. The themes are weirdly unchanged. We are all still navigating a deeply inauthentic adult world, one that seems to become more inauthentic with every passing moment. A world where truth is becoming harder to isolate and identify. Where artificial intelligence means that one day truth may even cease to exist. Where lines will blur, where one day we will inhabit a world built on the bias of our own curation.

As I watch her read I think, books. Story. Maybe this is the place where truth will always live. Somewhere AI can’t touch. Where understanding requires compassion and self-examination. Where broader themes compel you to examine the drivers that create the prejudice and pain in the world where you live.

So, the secret to the meaning of life?

Books.

Stories.

It’s just like being there.

Forget AI, books will set you free.