Books Are the Reason I Am Poor

Alastair Harper gives the lie to the current popular consensus that somehow books are better for us and the children than newer media, such as video games.

Although he wrongly asserts in the Guardian's Books Blog that a "book is as neutral as any container"—all media contain inherent biases that force us to think and view the world in a certain manner—he rightly observes that no lifelong bookworm he's ever known spends "weekends rolling in little pits of money in penthouses."

And as for the supposed moral superiority of books:

[B]efore I started reading, I was a rather subservient, slow little boy who never really did anything wrong, but never did much right either. Books inspired me to be very naughty indeed; and, with the simple moral logic of youth, I perceived them to be on my side, not authority's, which was what made me want to read them.