Some people, who don't read books, are asking, "Do you need to read books to be clever?" Well, that's pretty darn profound for people who don't read books -- unless they copied it from their computer, which reads books all the time; and no, to be clever, you have to actually be born clever. Reading books can only make you more knowledgeable; and, I might add, more happy.

What's more, if those of you who do read books are thinking I should have said "happier," instead of more happy, my computer beat you to it, and as usual, I ignored it. This is because you can sometimes safely break the rules, but only when you know what they are. That's part of the fun.

Sometimes you break a rule because the result just sounds better. Only a few readers will think I'm crazy. But not even one clever computer will understand what I mean. This is because computers have no soul. At this point, those who read books will be just as confused as those who don't. I know I am.

Anyway, as you have probably noticed, you do not have to be clever to write, either -- even if you go all grammatical and drive everyone crazy, which I have yet to do. ... well, grammatically anyway.

So, what I'm saying is, if you burn all the books in the world, your computer will have nothing left to tell you. Where do you think it gets all its stuff? Even if you don't need to read books, your computer does.

How many kids would have been captured by the magic of Harry Potter if they could read it only in the sterile glare of their computer? A book has a tactile, magical quality all its own. You can touch it. It's alive. A kid can hold the book to her heart and feel its warmth. The characters don't go away, when you close it, as they do when you turn off your television.

Watching a story on an electronic screen can't compare to reading Charles Dickens by lamplight from a big, much used book, which often, by its heavy darkness and color and musky odor, evokes the shops and the streets and the bizarre people of old London town. You can read a bit, then flip back and re-examine an illustration and go back to your page where Little Nell or Oliver Twist await your return, as does Scrooge, who never seems to quite take you along with him when he and his ghosts have been conjured, not by your vivid imagination, but by the director's guile and by the insipid light of a TV screen.

To insist that information is what counts and that other enjoyable stuff like fiction is unnecessary is to say that doing your taxes and washing the car is what counts and that watching football is as unnecessary as computer games.

Believe me, I am not comparing Charles Dickens with watching sports, although it would serve to illustrate my point when I tell you that Victoria Beckham claims never to have read a book at all.

I have just learned that Jamie Sharp admits to not having read a book at all last year. "I get my information in different ways." He says. "I get a lot of information from the Internet and that probably makes me better informed than a lot of book readers out there."

I too get information from the Internet, but I still enjoy reading an uninformative book and writing about any old thing, more than I enjoy research.

"It's not for nothing that books have been burned over the centuries," says Denise Winterman of BBC News magazine, "they are repositories of ideas and ideas empower people and broaden their horizons." You will notice that she points not to information as the key function of books but to ideas.

As far as I can tell, all the histories and beliefs of all the religions in the world are contained in holy books, and regardless of religious convictions, there is something spiritually moving about placing your hand on a book, which you believe to contain the word of God, when promising to tell the truth. Somehow I don't think it would evoke the same emotional response if you were to place your hand on a computer -- especially when you consider that it also contains video games and pornography -- and, during a power-cut, nothing at all.

Sometimes it's our early influences that shape our tastes. If you were never encouraged to read why not start with the first book of the Bible? Many of the Bible's stories have been made into big movies, and once again in those movies it's your conviction that you are hearing the voice of the Narrator that's missing. The director can't hope to equal its intensity. You don't have to be religious for the voice to stir you into reading more books. As for me I've done reading for the day. Now I'm going to watch a movie.

Anthony Cicale is a Lemoore resident. His column appears weekly in The Sentinel. Readers can write him at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232 or e-mail anthonycicale@hotmail.com.

(Jan. 20, 2008)