David McElroy

Tyler Weaver loves to read. The 9-year-old in Hudson Falls, N.Y., has been entering his local library’s summer reading contest for years. In fact, he’s been the winner of the reading contest for five years now, reading 373 books along the way.

In any rational universe, Tyler would be celebrated and encouraged. Instead, the director of the local library wants to change the rules of the contest. She wants to draw a random name out of a hat instead of allowing a child’s work and merit to determine the winner.

Tyler comes from a reading family. His 7-year-old brother, Jonathan, has taken second place for two years running now. Their mother, Katie, is proud of Tyler and Jonathan.

“I’ve told them God makes all of us different. There are some things that are hard and some that are easy, but they should excel at what they enjoy doing and Tyler just loves to read,” she told the local newspaper. “Everybody he tells, he gets high-fives. Everybody’s so proud of him.”

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Unless you’re just determined to ignore facts, this story makes it hard to keep believing that all Muslims are terrorists who are out to kill everyone who doesn’t share their faith. I suspect it will be ignored or discredited by those for whom it causes serious cognitive dissonance.

Late last week, the picture above was posted on the Facebook page of the Sohag governorate in Egypt. According to the caption, it’s local Muslims protecting a Christian church as marchers of the Muslim Brotherhood went through the city. In the political violence in the country, Christians have sometimes been targets of the pro-Morsi faction, so local people seemed determined not to let it happen in their city.

I’ve written before that it’s misguided and evil to hate everybody of any particular religion, whatever it is. I see a lot of people online who seem determined to believe that all Muslims are evil terrorists out to destroy this country. It’s certainly true that there’s a serious strain of hate and violence among certain radicalized Muslims, but it’s factually wrong to believe that reflects on every Muslim.

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Some people love ebook readers. They love the fact that they can have dozens or hundreds of books with them on a small device. With some of those gadgets, the power can last for days or weeks. You can order any book you want and have it immediately instead of going to a store or waiting for it to be shipped for you. That all sounds great. So why don’t I want one?

I’m thinking about this today because of a discussion that took place on my Facebook page Thursday morning. I posted a picture of a tongue-in-cheek display in a bookstore window. It listed the advantages of “real books” over ebooks, pointing out that they don’t need batteries or software upgrades. And so forth.

More than two dozen people quickly “liked” the picture, some just because they liked a clever promotion and some because they prefer “real books,” as I do. A few people chimed in to argue the superiority of ebooks, explaining that you can get PDFs of books and that you can carry lots of books with you, etc.

Here’s the thing. I understand the technical advantages of ebooks. It’s not that I’ve somehow missed the facts of how they work or what they’re capable of. I don’t need to be “educated” about them. It’s simply that other things matter more to me. For my needs and preferences, real books on real paper matter.

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