One Book Everyone Should Read

Before I begin, I have to examine Alec’s motives when proposing this topic.  What exactly does he mean by ‘one book everyone should read’? Are we taking ‘everyone’ literally?  And, let’s just say everyone does read this book – what is the end goal?  To entertain?  To inspire?  Or is this simply a giant summons for book recommendations?

Regardless of Alec’s actual intentions, I am going to write this essay as using the most literal interpretation of the topic possible. To make things easier down the road, the book-in-question will hereafter be referred to as The Book.  This means, to me, The Book must be one that all of humanity has to read.  Because of this, I had a very hard time starting this essay.  How can I pick ONE book that EVERYONE should read?  People are so very different from one another, and I believe these differences are at least partially reflected in our literary preferences.  So how can there be one book to rule them all that will move and change people?  In my admittedly melodramatic interpretation of this topic, of course I choose the purpose of this omni-book to be to inspire and better humanity. “Where did bettering humanity come into it?”, you may ask.  To cut to the chase, I’ve determined that the only plausible reason why every single person on the planet should read one particular book is because that book is going to better humanity in some way.  If people had to read The Book for something like amusement, I would feel bad making every single person take valuable time out of their day to read a book they might have had little interest in beforehand (based on the assumption that people WILL do what they SHOULD do.  There are a lot of assumptions in this essay).  A book that would help the world, on the other hand, would be worth the hassle and inconvenience.   But how can such a book exist?  Moreover, why that book, and not another, similar one?  Who am I to decide that THAT book is the book that will inspire humanity?  This reasoning is why I cannot choose the Bible or anything of that nature for this essay; there are some great morals and ideals in there (definitely the sentiment God was going for with the bible: “Nice message, but lacks focus”), but why should that be the thing that humanity takes it’s cues from?  Why not the Torah, or the Koran?

All this why-ing started to make my brain hurt, so I concluded that ‘adult’ books are much too murky to be named The Book.  They’re too specialized – no matter what, someone will be alienated.  Also, by the time we’re old enough to read and understand ‘adult’ books, our bad habits are already too far ingrained to be changed.  I don’t mean to be creepy, but… the saying is ‘Get ’em while they’re young’.

Which is why I decided the only appropriate course of action was to choose a children’s book.  As soon as I made this decision, I knew exactly the book I wanted to talk about.  Cliché as it is, I wondered why I didn’t think of it before.  But now that I get to the part of this essay where I actually tell you something meaningful instead of just one long, drawn-out narration of my thought-process, I find that I don’t have much to say about the book itself.  Not because the story isn’t worthy of being crowned The Book, but because I feel like it’s just one of those things you just have to read for yourself.

Tmr;ste (too much rambling; skipped to end) – I was quite moved by this book as a child.  The love, sadness and overwhelming compassion that came out of this book, at least to me, was incredibly powerful.  Though I’m sure there are many different interpretations of this story, I think this is really a tale about caring.  I feel like the world would be a much better place if we all cared a little more.

Thus, I think everyone should read ‘The Giving Tree’, by Shel Silverstein.