By :
Andrea Amalia Salma
I ever heard a statement that you are the environment that you’re in, you are the people that you’re hang out with and you’re the information that you consume. From that statement, we know that it’s so important to live in a good environment, choose people to spend most of your time with and to gain as much information as you can. One of the things you can do to upgrade your self is by reading. Reading is a good habit. It trains your brain. Make you see the other side of the world and improves your memory and concentration. By reading you can also take lessons that the authors may have taken decades to learn, to consumed, and written it into a book.
Like we all know, the first word revealed in the Qur’an is “Read”, as a Muslim we should make reading as a habit. Like exercise that can train our body, Reading Train our brains.
Developing good reading habits since we were kids are so important. Family plays a quite effective role in fostering children’s reading habit. Parents can read stories for their children before sleep, taking children to borrow books from libraries or even make a library at home and read books together.
To make people like reading, we have to make the place to read books engaging. One thing we can do is to make libraries cozy places to hangout. Like in Finland, libraries are not only places to read, but also to socialize. They also offer more than books, including lending e-publications, sports equipment, and other “items for occasional use”.
Honestly, I myself also need to develop reading habit. To broaden my knowledge I can’t read novels only, I also have to read self-help, biographies and other kinds of books. But the thing is, like in my old school’s library and public libraries, there are not many kinds of books and most of them are outdated.
I hope that Indonesia can improve their libraries, be it from the facilities, the interior and also the books. So that Indonesian will visit libraries more often and develop their reading skills.
The writer is Santri Pesantren Riset Al-Muhtada and Students of the Faculty of Language and Art, Universitas Negeri Semarang
