Tag: literacy

Posted on

Fight for Books and Revive Reading Culture

I’m worried about literacy. We don’t have enough of it. Too many people either don’t read, obsess over social media, or scan summaries instead of experiencing the immersion of pulling a book and getting movies in their minds. Fewer people make the time or have the patience to enjoy a book, and that’s bad for our brains. It’s bad for all of us.

I’m going to recommend three books. (I wrote two of them.)

One of books I’m enjoying recently is Anthony Hopkins ‘ autobiography, We Did OK, Kid. (If you listen to the audiobook, Kenneth Brannaugh narrates, and his voice work is, as you’d expect, excellent.) Hopkins reminded me of his role in 84 Charing Cross Road. Last night, I ran across the book and I bought it immediately.

This slim volume is an ode to a bygone time when books were valued so much more by many more people. It’s an epistolary story wherein a very literate and funny woman in New York has a back-and-forth with a bookseller in London, England. Beginning in 1949, she requests used books only they can procure to her satisfaction. If you love books, you’ll love the movie and the book.

As soon as I found it at the bookstore, I had to buy a latte and dig in immediately. It’s a funny, plotless book with an unambitious premise. It’s not about dark forces taking over the galaxy. It’s just letters back and forth by bibliophiles who, incidentally, will never meet in person.

And to be honest, I choked up a little. 84 Charing Cross Road takes place in hard times. It’s a time I never lived in, yet I’m nostalgic for: A time when more people loved books, discussed books, and fiction and non-fiction were more centered in the culture. Your phone is full of vitriol. Push back on the brain rot. Reject rage bait that seeks to anger you for clicks. Choose media that informs, entertains, and enriches.

How do we fight forces pushing literacy down? Read books. Make it normal to discuss books. Review books. Support authors. Join a book club. Don’t fall for censorship. Read banned books. Frequent your local library and little libraries. Read to your kids. Put down the phone more and pick up books instead. Make reading ubiquitous again. I don’t know how much we’ll improve literacy, but at least we can try to hold the line and not let reading fall by the wayside completely.

The next book I recommend is mine, and it’s on sale now.

It’s release week for my new psychological thriller, Where the Night Takes Us.

Dr. Simon Fethullah was the FBI profiler who put the Rainy Day Cannibal away. The cannibal’s back, and the madman coming for Simon and his family. Find out more about the plot here.

Or, even better, just do this:

BUY NOW for just 99 cents!

Another recommendation:

I have entered Endemic for the Booklife Prize. Endemic won the North Street Book Prize in 2022, so I’m hopeful. Part of the deal is that I received a review from a Booklife critic. Here’s what they had to say:

Title: Endemic
Author: Robert Chazz Chute
Genre: Fiction/Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Audience: Adult
Word Count: 99876

Assessment:

Plot: Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Robert Chazz Chute’s science fiction follows Ovid as she navigates a transformed society and searches for her place within it. Chute creates a believable setting that gives the story a strong sense of possibility and danger. Fans of apocalyptic fiction and detailed world-building will find much to enjoy.

Prose: Robert Chazz Chute opens in medias res, with Ovid on the streets of New York after a virus has ravaged the city and much of the world. For anyone who lived through COVID-19, the premise carries an unsettling echo of reality: a city under lockdown that emerges permanently changed. Chute’s vivid descriptions give this altered world a strong sense of place, while its specialized jargon reflects the communities that have formed without leaving readers struggling to understand them.

Originality: Chute gives the story its own identity through its attention to group dynamics and the communities that emerge after disaster. Its vision of a world that remains recognizable yet has been permanently altered makes Endemic a strong addition to post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Character Execution: For fans of science fiction and end-of-the-world stories, much of the appeal lies in seeing how people adapt when the rules of ordinary life disappear. Chute portrays the community Ovid must navigate with impressive detail, while making her survival something readers will genuinely root for. Her encounters and conflicts with the people around her reveal how this new world is changing her, making Ovid a memorable protagonist.

GET ENDEMIC NOW

~ Thanks for being a reader! I’m Robert Chazz Chute, the suspense writer who works from a blanket fort in Other London. It would help me immensely if you let me entertain you. Enjoy my books for hours of twisty fun. Books make great gifts, so buy in bulk. 😉

Posted on

Manifesto: The Value of Writing and Reading

Within every book secrets are revealed, but there are deeper treasures buried beneath what you see. The book is a solid thing you can hold. The story is a  sparking, fleeting experience daring you to give chase and to catch fire.

A story is a progression through possibilities, a dense connection of ideas that ignites new electrical connections in your brain, tripping switches, releasing dopamine, letting tears slip and laughter burst. You create worlds with the author, meeting the writer’s mind amid the small words to share great visions. You are not simply decoding the language on the page. In reading, you open hidden portals to new variables: Data, information, knowledge, wisdom, lies, truth, lies that tell the truth, experience and, ultimately, choice.

Books offer novelty, chance, escape, distraction, transcendence, freedom and stimulation like no other art. Books are a uniquely cooperative, requiring a deft  weaver, yes, but also an audience willing to be gentle. Readers are dance partners. Lose yourself in the movement. Let go of counting one-two-three, one-two three. Instead, look in your dance partner’s eyes and embrace them. Enjoy the dance. Hold tight. Hold so tight you let go.

Promise: You will be transported through space, whirled in time and transformed with emotion, but you will always waking in your own bed, deposited where you began and a little regretful you aren’t in Oz anymore. It’s okay. When you come back, you aren’t you anymore. You never walk through the same door twice and remain unchanged.

For those doors you choose to open? Walk through, tread lightly and learn how to live from people who have never lived. Meet and be among characters with whom you would never dare to speak. You will witness terrible examples of how to interact in reality (…whatever that is. Imagination is a much clearer path.)  Through the heroes and heroines you meet, you will know pain and loss, sacrifice and triumph. Stories are the matrix of our desires, fears  and dreams. Books are simulations and wise guides, asking you to  draw your own conclusions.

Your mind evolved with your bare feet in the cold dirt, haunches aching, as you basked in the heat of the campfire. Amid the smell of burning meat, you listened to soaring legends about the milky pearls shining and reaching down from the black infinite. You listened to tales of the hunt and, in telling your own stories of bravery, searching and loss, reached up to touch the infinite. We tell stories to illuminate the darkness.

The careful words we pull to ourselves in the form of books are comforts in a world where, elsewhere, words are casual weapons. In the patient future, you will lie upon an overstuffed couch under a cozy blanket by your fireplace, listening to a storm’s rage and, gratefully, you will disappear into a book. Stories are journeys through mythology, revisited for the depth of our common visceral experience, touched on repeatedly to remind ourselves we are thinking, reaching, grasping animals.

The most valuable treasures slip in when you are sleeping in the reader’s trance. Meditate on theme. A book yields more than what you read. A book is a still lake on a warm summer day: Watch the rippling wind write on its surface; spot fish darting beneath in cool water; see your reflection; stretch your awareness up to the ponderous turn of clouds; lift yourself beyond, back to the infinite. Think. Reach. Grasp. 

Books are valuable because they reach into your mind and become part of who you are. Our books are ourselves. The mind does not distinguish between reality and fantasy. You know this is true of dreams, your fears and what you read. I am a writer, giving you the bones of the structure of a world. You fill in the rest, seeing my broad brushstrokes in minute detail.

Your mind is a magnificent camera that runs on black-and-white words. Your camera does not simply  record my words. You are much more important than that. Your camera co-creates in color. No two writers write the same story. A secret: No two readers draw the same word pictures from one writer. Reading is creation, too.

Books are more special than we recognize because they are no longer rare. Were novels new, they would not possess mere novelty. They would be seen as powerful. Books release staggering magic from within you, a fire once lit that must be fed.

I am a whisper in your mind. Thank you for letting me in. Amplify my words and make their thunder shake the everyday world away. Hold my book in your hands, enter the story and feel electricity’s hum. I am lightning on the horizon of your consciousness. Through this curious magic, I will meet you there. I will become you.

This is the only divinity I know.Â