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By NOAH WORTHAM | Managing Editor

While my mother shopped around at Walmart, I strolled about simultaneously bored but also captivated by the sea of items spread about the store. As my eyes wandered about, they seized onto a particular novel sitting on the shelf. It was a blue paperback with an imaginative cover that featured a young boy like me but with black hair, nerdy glasses and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt. Surrounding this character were candles and a ghostly breeze blowing through the scene which immediately captured my imagination—I wanted this book. But as a young boy with no job, I proceeded to do the only thing I could: beg my mother for it to which she graciously relented.

Now the book, which I’m sure many readers my age have already accurately guessed, was “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” which is the fifth book in the series—not exactly the ideal place to start, but I loved it anyway.

As someone who writes for a living, it’s safe to say that my early love of literature was key in shaping me into the person I am today both professionally and ethically. Even fiction like Harry Potter contains a nearly infinite amount of interpretations, lessons and allegories that could be extracted and discussed ad infinitum.

Now, we no longer live in the same world I grew up in or you grew up in. Most people—of all ages I’ve noticed—are transfixed by their phones. It’s anecdotal, but it feels like it’s getting rarer and rarer to see a kid or even an adult, sitting alone with a good book.

Which is why I am thrilled that the Shelby County Children’s Policy Council has set up a Bookworm Vending Machine now at the Shelby County Courthouse. Adorned in cute drawings by local students, this machine is available to anyone to access for free and deposits literature for children to take home.

Judge Erin Welborn highlighted that the machine is there to encourage kids to read and to spend less time looking at screens—a sentiment I agree with but would take even further. It’s obviously easier said than done, but we should all spend less time looking at screens and more time reading.

It doesn’t have to be Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway or Fyodor Dostoevsky. Whatever it is that sparks your imagination and you enjoy, pick that up to get back into the habit—even a comic book. When you reach the end of your life and you look back on how you spent the invaluable and limited amount of time you had, would you have rather have spent those idle hours scrolling or turning the page?