Kaback: Make room for ‘Captain Underpants’ amid Netflix, PS3

I feel like our generation takes too much blame for this nation’s problems. Obesity happened… I feel like our generation takes too much blame for this nation’s problems. Obesity happened because we played too many video games. Unemployment happened because we all decided to get useless degrees. Four Loko happened because — well, I don’t really think anyone knows what happened there.

I get it. I know that people in our generation did a lot of things very differently than those in years before. We didn’t play outside enough with our friends. Can you really blame us though? Between scary strangers, the necessity for hand sanitizer and the general lack of outdoor PlayStations, I think you can understand where we were coming from.

So when I overheard an older couple the other day saying the U.S. was becoming a land of the uneducated, I should have known who they thought were at fault.

The true root, of course, according to this couple, is that nobody reads, and thus doesn’t have the ability to understand almost any subject. It’s been true ever since there was a division between the literate and illiterate. Without a strong ability to read, a person was severely disadvantaged in gaining knowledge, and we all know that knowledge is power.

I wanted to shout out an amen. After all, I am a huge proponent of reading. Ever since I was introduced to the wonder of “Captain Underpants” books in elementary school, I’ve been hooked. The subject matter has changed, but I can still be transported through literature like I was when I was a child.

However, it became abundantly clear that this particular conversation was about how young people don’t read anymore. I first have to stress that today, we simply read in different ways and different formats. Regardless, I agree that we don’t read enough. I do understand the criticism though; like everything else that our generation is blamed for, there are some pretty good reasons that we don’t read.

Reason No. 1: TV is awesome. Movies are awesome. Online streaming is awesome. I know that when Abraham Lincoln was growing up, books were one of the few forms of entertainment, but c’mon! I guess that television wasn’t on 24 hours a day for many of our parents. I get that DVR systems didn’t allow them to watch literally every show on television. And, although I really don’t understand how, I can logically deduce that older generations couldn’t use Netflix. I know that reality television might not power our brains quite like a great novel, but I do not believe for one second that anyone would rather spend their night with Ernest Hemingway than Snooki. OK Woody Allen, I guess you made a movie about people who would rather do that (“Midnight in Paris”), but isn’t that my point? I’d rather watch a movie about wanting to hang out with people that wrote books that people used to read than actually read it. I can Wikipedia those literary references anyway.

Reason No. 2: When and where am I supposed to read? Between school, work and homework, I have a hard timejustifying reading for fun. If I’m going to be sitting in my room going over a book, I might as well make it a textbook and get something out of it that will go on a transcript, right? In this time-compressed world that we live in, it’s very difficult to pick the 300-page book over the 90-minute movie.

I tried to maximize my down time to get some good reading in. I started trying to read on a Port Authority bus. Have you ever actually traveled in a bus? Between bumps in the road, the 30 people crowding on top of me and the fact that I have to stand for the entire ride, buses are not conducive to reading. I then tried to do it on the walk to class. That just ended with lots of angry south Oaklanders and injured joggers. I finally gave a valiant attempt to do some reading while shaving which, as you might imagine, ended in disaster and blood spill.

Professors, have I not convinced you? The truth is that some of the best times of my life have been shared with Harry Potters and Holden Caulfields. My experiences in Pittsburgh have been inspired by Michael Chabon. And the hard times in my life have their characters and authors as well.

I can’t say that I entirely blame my peers for watching, rather than reading, “Game of Thrones.” I understand where they come from because we’ve all been there. I, for one, want to change that. I don’t care if it’s on a Kindle, Nook, hardcover, paperback, magazine, website, cell phone or any of the limitless options available to us — I am going to make a greater effort to read. I’m going to take it out on the bus and sneak a page before bed. I’m going to go through the good and the bad with the characters that remind me that we are all much more alike than not. I’m going to read, and you should too.

Have a favorite book you want to recommend? Email Andrew at aak47@pitt.edu.