“Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body.” -Sir Richard Steele
At a lecture I once attended on reading, the lecturer quoted Mark Twain who said, “The man who doesn’t read is no better off than the man who can’t read.” It was an idea I hadn’t considered before, and I had one of those moments where things clicked. Twain’s words still ring true despite all of our entertainment technologies and distractions.
But in 2007, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that one in four American adults had not read a book in the previous year. Just over a thousand people were surveyed. The poll qualified people into various demographics, though none gave a definitive answer to the question. Why did 25% not read at least one book in the course of a year? And was this an accurate cross section for American adults in general?
When I came across Jill Noel Kandel’s essay “Asking for Salt” in Image last summer, it struck me that maybe non-readers are not just people who don’t like to read. In the essay, Kandel tries to teach her son Brian to read. Brian doesn’t retain the alphabet and can’t remember the sounds the letters make. It’s a constant struggle for Kandel, who can see that her son is intelligent, compassionate, and loving. For some unknown reason, there is a disconnect in his brain which prevents him from reading. At the beginning of the essay, Brian is eight years old; at the end, he is sixteen and still can’t read. It’s heartbreaking.
I think a lot about what it means to be a reader – what reading is really worth. The truth is, I love to read, but this wasn’t always the case. I know plenty of people who can read but choose not to, and for years I was counted among them. As a child, I learned to read early and easily, but didn’t spend much time reading. I found other things to occupy my time, like watching television. And I watched a lot of television, something that became a crutch I’d eventually have to wean myself off of. In fact, like most American families, much of my home life was centered around watching television. If my parents read books when I was young, I never knew.
I finished high school having been in honors English, though I read very few books cover to cover, mostly cracking open novels enough to get the gist and write a decent essay. When I got to college, I still read very few books, only reading in its entirety what piqued my interest or what I forced myself to get through in order to add insight to discussions. But during college, I could feel a shift away from television and toward reading. My double major in English and communication led me through studies of the media’s effect on the masses and how to think critically about the information I absorb, all while studying literature ranging from the greats to the relatively obscure. In the midst of it all, I knew I wanted to be a reader.
During that time, my classes led me to two books that informed the shift toward my becoming a reader: Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug and Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book. They are counted among favorites on my bookshelf, even now, six years later.
The Plug-In Drug is a look at how television-watching affects children and the family unit. Winn stresses the importance of having a family life without television and gives parents the tools necessary to manage the medium. This book radically changed my perspective on television. I started thinking more intentionally about how much time I devoted to passively gazing at images on the screen, and the impact of that action on my relationships.
Adler’s book, on the other hand, delves into the depths of reading, an action Adler qualifies into four levels: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Honestly, it’s pretty dry, but is sprinkled with enough useful information for the wannabe reader to have held my interest. Adler encourages readers to inspect the books they read from cover to cover and make lots of notes in the margins. He thinks readers should be asking questions of the literature they read and think about how texts might interrelate (the fourth level of reading). But there is one tip from this book that’s stayed with me: read for long periods of time. In reading for more than a few minutes here or there, you have time to sink in and develop a relationship with the book, and the book in turn has a greater opportunity to work its magic on you.
I don’t know exactly how, but in my senior year of college, it just clicked for me. I became a reader and always had a book by my side. Now my home is littered with piles of books, and I have a to-read list that grows by the day. I love the idea that we each carry with us what Gabriel Zaid calls in So Many Books a reading constellation, a catalog of books read, unique to each reader. Zaid writes that the books you read must speak to you in some profound way, even if they aren’t the classics or mainstream fiction.
As a writer, I find it particularly important to read often and read widely, so I do. I admire people who read voraciously, and I want to be counted among them. I read to keep my mind sharp and because it makes me smarter than I actually am. I read because it engages me in a way nothing else does and nourishes my soul. I love everything about books, down to the way they smell, and believe wholeheartedly that every word on every page that I lay my eyes on informs who I am.
As a woman about to become a mother, I wonder what shapes certain people into readers and others into (essentially) non-readers. I want my child to learn to love reading. So does Jill Noel Kandel.
My husband, as a child, struggled with reading, and he still does. He doesn’t have a learning disorder, but learns better from hearing and doing. That’s not to say that he doesn’t read. He could outread me on anything having to do with Irish civilization. But maybe not everyone is meant to be a reader, even if they’re literate. Maybe the written word doesn’t nourish everyone’s soul in the same way, or at all. Like so many things, we can only influence our child; we can’t force him or her to love reading or, as in Kandel’s case, even to have the capacity to read. All my husband and I can do for our child, in hopes that he or she will learn to love reading, is read aloud often, turn the television off, and foster the attitude that reading is an important component of the human experience. From there, we’ll let the chips fall where they may.
