And what rough beast, it's hour come at last

Hello my darlings, my doves, my tiny alter egos of my ego altar.
Edit: I AM sorry, it's been so long, I've forgotten to give you mood music. It's tech house today, we're getting particularly navel gazing and second guessish.
I recall, I believe, writing about the unfortunate mythology that surrounds books in today's facebook oriented society.
Let me clarify that, because otherwise you're going to think I'm one of those shitheads who A. uses terms like 'facebook oriented society' without retching, and B. believes that the society of today revolves around facebook. Which it doesn't. And I'm not. But, despite the pitfalls, I'm using the phrase to try and communicate the specific type of person slash mindset that I'm talking about.
You know them. Typically literary in some way, always plastering their shared media sources with sanctimonious yet earnest tripe and piffle regarding the MAGIC NATURE OF BOOKS the ABILITY TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE to SPIRIT YOU AWAY TO A WONDERLAND to PROFOUNDLY AFFECT YOUR MINDSET.
Typically accompanied by those sort of drawings where the world is portrayed as drab and dour until a rainbow pours out of the pages and butterflies and blue-sky-bracketed clouds forming portals for inner city kids to traverse and etc etc reading rainboooooooowwwwww.

And of course they're totally right and that's the annoying part. As is the case with most things clichè, it's grounded in a truth so undeniable that bothering to state it outright comes off as unnecessary, wasteful. Which is why we instantly bristle when we hear people say them, regardless of their accuracy. It's the same reason we roll our eyes when people make airplane food jokes. Yes it's bad. We've heard. Mattress tags are indeed silly. How astute of you. Yes, books have the power to worm their way into your mind like a prion and start snapping ideas together like so many misfolded proteins, leaving spongy mush in their wake. You didn't have to go and say it like that, like it gives you any authority. Like stating the obvious earns you any points.
It progresses too easily towards that sort of self congratulatory mindset that automatically places the thinker on the side with the clouds, unicorns, and rainbows. Beyond appreciation to deification, cultish mindless bullshit like if they don't have books don't fuck them and so on. Which I spit on, as I've said before.
Not that it doesn't apply, of course. I mean, I doubt I'll ever find myself in a situation where I'd have to make that decision, but most of that revolves around the fact that my ability to fuck people relies a significant amount on whether they've read the right books beforehand, rather than a judgement call on my part.

But the idea persists, and not solely because it gives people a yummy feeling in their ego to think it. Those sort of empty calorie notions flash in and out quickly (you know, switching your profile picture to something pink, or red, or green, to symbolize solidarity with the flavor of crusade as appropriate). Book reverence perseveres through decades. Why? Because it almost demands it.

Have you ever read or watched a depiction of a character learning to read? Who wasn't a kid doing it at the 'appropriate' age? There's only one way for it to go. The character struggles, sheepishly because he's having issues with something children can do - often utilizing children-oriented subject matter and tools - until suddenly, finally, Spot runs and the transformation begins. Our character ecstatically reads everything in sight. The world opens to him and he giddily traipses about agog at the density of information crammed into these little curls and lines everywhere he looks.
It's clichè because it's the only way it could possibly go.
Words are actually that powerful! It's inconceivable that, after having lived with indifference (if not suspicion and resentment) towards letters and symbols your whole life, you wouldn't just be brainmelted as your worldview expands exponentially to contain the combined literary works of everyone ever ever.
Of course, as kids we weren't in much of a position to appreciate this.
I still remember my own moment, with these cheap yellow covered reading primers of thirty odd pages, struggling against them until they managed to slip past and lodge themselves behind my eyes and suddenly suddenly COMPREHENSION and subsequent elation and going back and grabbing all of these damn books and paging through them like blazes and probably bothering the shit out of everyone since you're damn right I read them aloud, who wouldn't?

It's just annoying, is all. To be reminded. To start reading books again after a period where they were an unaffordable luxury, to get that nudging from the world, from your own brain, that is the cerebral equivalent of a pious newsfeed post talking about the wondrous emancipating powers of words.
Because it's undeniable.
Because I can feel it, I can observe it and it's terrifying because who was I before, who did I used to be, how dull of a person have I been without this? Have I been? HAVE I been? Am I still? I didn't ask for any of this, you bastards.