On Reading

When and What to Read?

Anything you damn well want to, anytime you want to.

Big readers love long books. I mean, we’ll read short ones too, but often we’re enjoying a fictional world and we want to stay as long as we can. We want more, not less, almost always. It’s also why we read series that run to ten or twenty or even forty books – more time in a world that hopefully is constantly becoming more developed and introducing us to more people. This is also why we re-read: we want more time in the world. We want more time with our imaginary friends. Length also has nothing to do with speed. Whether you’re a fast reader or slow makes no difference and you should never judge yourself. Reading is something that you can absolutely do at your own speed – it’s entertainment reading I’m talking about here, not work/required reading. That’s a whole different topic. And I’m talking about fiction – I don’t read much non-fiction beyond history and articles. It generally simply isn’t my thing.

I completely believe in quitting a book. If it’s not what you want, if you don’t like it or enjoy it, if you’re irritated or just not into it – stop. Sell it to a second-hand store for a couple bucks or give it away. Life is too short to spend it reading a whole book because you think you have to. You don’t. I have – more than I’d like to admit – continued reading series I didn’t like because something was compelling me. A lot like watching a whole tv series because for some reason you just can’t stop, thought its not fun anymore and you feel like you’re using yourself. I also believe in skimming parts. I cannot follow the spatial relations of most battle sequences. The pastoral descriptions of journeys generally bore me. The details of chase scenes in cities I don’t know well are lost on me. I skim to the end because I only need to know the bottom line to keep going with the parts I will and can read. I’m not taking a test! I know I’m a competent reader and have nothing to prove. And in a specific note, if you start trying to read The Lord of the Rings, read the beginning through Bilbo’s exit, and skip to Gandalf sending Frodo and Sam off, to the appearance of the Black Riders, to the departure of the Shire, to the Barrow Mounds, to Tom Bombadil, or to Bree if you have to. The lengthy period of the bucolic life in the Shire has bogged down and defeated more than one reader – so skip it! Just skip it. By the time you’ve finished the trilogy you may have a lot more patience and desire to go back and read those years of peace and happiness or the early misadventures before they meet up with Strider. They’re still there if you want to return. I have. But to start, you may need to get to some real action.

Fiction is not real. I am not unclear on the difference between Middle Earth, or Hogwarts, or the unimaginably distant future of Dune, and reality. Just because I read about spells (I know the difference between LeviOsa and LevioSAH.) or vampirism (Why all the spraying and splatter? Is that how you play with your food?) doesn’t mean I think they’re real. I enjoy the fantasy, but that’s because I know it’s fantasy. I don’t want to be a wizard or a werewolf; I do enjoy reading about them. When I hear of parents banning books of magic, fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels from kids I am critical of those parents, yes, but also bemused. Do these adults think magic is real and therefore non-Christian magic is dangerous? I personally know at least one actual functioning adult who truly believed a demon banged on her door one night, so there are undoubtably more of them. (Seems a pretty good understanding of demonology or magic-wielder issues with invitations to enter for someone not reading the same supernatural fiction I am. You’ve got your classic vampire need to be invited in, but in some lore other beings, as in Dresden Files, are affected too. What’s she been reading? And why does she think a fiend from hell is after her? I mean, I’m scared of clowns thanks in large part to It, but I also don’t believe in an alien who appears as clowns and spiders to live off the fear of kids who can see it.)

I was questioned twice in my life about what I was reading. The first time because I wanted a Nancy Drew book bought and someone, who shall remain nameless, didn’t believe I could read it. I immediately opened it and began reading aloud. Then silently, as I got absorbed, and before I knew it I was walking out with the book. The second was because I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends, kid poems by Shel Silverstein, and someone, who shall remain nameless, was a little concerned because they knew Shel Silverstein wrote for Playboy and they wanted to be sure what I was reading wasn’t Playboy material. I think both of those were reasonable questions. Otherwise I read Great Expectations in fifth grade, Dracula in sixth (and yeah, I knew that stuff was a metaphor the first time) The Count of Monte Cristo the summer after sixth grade, Dune (the whole original Frank Herbert series) was seventh and eighth. I have re-read all of those, some of them dozens of times, since.

You can learn a lot from fiction. My vocab level is greatly due to reading. Always being spoken to as an adult, rather than a child, helped too. And undoubtably the insistence, of someone who shall remain nameless, in not answering questions about meaning or spelling but directing me to a dictionary. If you’re a curious reader, and follow hints in your reading about people, geography, animals, what have you, you can come across untold tidbits and interesting things. Like the relationship between the width of railroad tracks and ancient, like BC, carts. Like figuring out what ancient places are called now. Like picking apart what parts of historical fiction are fact and fiction, and thus learning the history. Like learning about cultures completely different than your own, like Native American or Inuit or ancient lost civilizations.

Do you know how to be a big reader? Read all the time. Never be without a book (I highly recommend a Kindle for this. Lightweight, can access thousands of books in seconds, with its own light source.) so that you can read travelling, in commute, waiting in lines, eating lunch, during a break, while brushing your teeth (yes I do) and while taking a bath. And here’s a note: when I say “read” I mean consume. If listening to audio books is your jam, I support you entirely. I love them.

I owe my number one pastime to the people who read to me, near me, and around me. Who taught me how to read at three, four. Who gave me unlimited access to books, who valued them beyond any other possession. Who taught me that knowledge and ideas are invaluable, the building blocks of success, and create options. Who enabled me, through books, to not be ignorant of fundamental things, like where babies come from and what to expect in puberty. To be a life-long anti-racist. And to never consider that anything was barred from me due to being a girl. To be thoughtful, to be open, to be critical, to be far more empathetic than I would have been otherwise.

I do not believe everyone must be a big reader. I know that it is the most fundamental element of my life and I can’t imagine, really, living any other way – except by the examples I have of that from books. And being a teacher, faced with preparing Juniors in high school for the SAT who had never read a whole book before. Not one. Even as school children, who had failed them so thoroughly that they never made it through a single whole book? At least their teachers should have made that happen, but apparently, they didn’t. Part of it, I believe, was because the teachers weren’t wide readers either. I taught To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby – the classics of high school American literature that are, not co-incidentally, easy to find copious ready-made study materials for (I always made my own. It felt like cheating otherwise.)  – but I also turned to other American novels. The Maltese Falcon and Ender’s Game. I taught them how to read a mystery, like questioning everything, and understanding the implications of clues, and wanting to figure it out themselves kept them reading and guessing and competing to be ahead and know the answer first. (They didn’t even turn to the movie – they actually read it.) And science fiction and its demands on imagination, conceptualizing things that don’t exist in our world. It opened a new world to some kids such that they returned again and again to me for suggestions of other sci-fi to read. Classics are valuable and called such for a reason, but finding something that lights a fire in a kid is crucial. Seeing them find a desire for the quiet and solitary pastime of reading is so moving. Not that I think they shouldn’t move or socialize or play, but sometimes you need to lose yourself. And reading is one of the easiest, most versatile, ways to do it.

Right now, I’m re-reading the Pendergast series by Preston & Child. The first one is Relic. I love them because I love the characters, I love the complexity of the mysteries, I love the esoteric knowledge, and I love how many words I have to look up. Being vocabulary challenged is such fun. Thank the tech gods for Kindle’s dictionary/translation/wikipedia access. I now know more about the New York Natural History Museum than anyone who’s never been has any right to. In the latest book, when they briefly returned to the NYNH, I just laughed with joy. I was so nostalgic for the place.

I was just ruminating on what reading is to me – thanks for reading this. I hope books and audiobooks and magazines and comics and plays and poetry are part of the enrichment of your life.