Reading IS Fundamental
I’ve always been a poor reader. I don’t read books as often as I should, or even as much as I’d like. And when I do, I’m ashamed to say that I’m also a slow reader. I read at about the pace of if the words were being spoken. It hasn’t been until recently that I’ve acquired a taste for reading, but that’s something that I mostly blame on my school system growing up.
Throughout my elementary school years, we were assigned to read constantly. It doesn’t sound much like a bad idea, but it was given an attitude that affected how I built my relationship with reading. That attitude was that reading was the superior platform of media. Neither the most artistic piece of cinema nor the the most informative educational television program could never compare to even the worst novel. Reading was the key to brilliance. You have to love books. All books were great, simply by virtue of the fact that they were books. It was exactly the way that the South Park episode depicted.
What made the experience most frustrating was the emphasis on novels. Routinely, we were told to read a novel and write a report on it. Only rather than produce a review or a simple synopsis of the book, we were lead to practically write promotional pamphlets for them. Every report that we gave (at least the ones that were graded well) carried on about how we loved it and how awesome the story was. We weren’t encouraged to critically examine it. If we didn’t like a book, then well, we must not have understood it, so fail. If you didn’t like that one, you must not like books. How dare you!
As if peer pressure when you were a kid wasn’t hard enough, what you read became just another means for other kids to judge you in my classes. Amazon.com hadn’t been invented yet and there were no used book stores near where I grew up, so while all the cool kids read classic titles or the popular books by Judy Blume, my folks would buy these value packs of books that were like, 3 for $7 or something. And they were all garbage. Our library wasn’t much help since I went to a pretty lame public school with a limited selection. And my folks weren’t about to drive me to the real library downtown. Twice, if you count then returning the books I’d borrowed.
The one thing that I did enjoy was whenever the entire class would read a book together. We’d not only read aloud in class, but we’d discuss the book’s contents. This would nurture us to grow mentally by exploring the concepts within the book…and in an open forum! When we were simply told to read a book and write about what we’d read, we’d be left to our own devices. Either ideas would be missed, misinterpreted, or glanced over.
Not enough attention was given toward encouraging us to explore our tastes in reading. Maybe some of us (like myself) didn’t care for fiction as much as maybe reference material. Maybe instead of frolicking through Narnia, I would have preferred to dive into some physics or philosophy. I think that pushing me into novels and dictating that I must like them more repelled me from books than attracted. If that pressure were not present, I might have been more open to explore fiction, as my peers were.
I was relieved once I entered 6th grade and I was blessed with a more relaxed teacher. Typically, the first 30min of class were designated as our quiet reading time, where we read to ourselves. Previous teachers set limits on what types of books we could read, but my 6th grade teacher understood that the goal was to encourage us to read, not what to read. For her, the sky was the limit! We could read our book report book, a newspaper, a magazine…even comics! I’d bring in a stack of Groo The Wanderer and even share with the kids at my table! If I had more teachers with that kind of open policy, rather than preaching propaganda, I think I would have been more receptive toward giving books a chance.
I think that sometimes, it takes one platform to act as a stepping stone into another. A lot of times, I’ll see a movie based on a novel and I’ll give that a shot. Sometimes I’ll find the book was better (like The Da Vinci Code) and sometimes may even prefer the movie (such as Fight Club). I found Fast Food Nation to be quite fascinating, which ironically I wouldn’t have even tried if not for a movie, Super-Size Me! (Although don’t see the movie version of Fast Food Nation…it’s ass.)
These days, I’m still not much of a novelist. I think it would take someone who really knew me and my tastes to sell me on trying a novel. But most of what I enjoy reading is non-fiction. Currently, I’m working my way through Dreams Of Love And Fateful Encounters, a book exploring love and attractions; as subject I have a passion for. What’s great about it is that I find it not only informative, but it’s challenged my vocabulary with every paragraph. It’s books like these that I wish we’d been encouraged to explore when I was a kid.
