Reading

 I was reading Giffy’s blog on ‘Why I read’ and then had to take a third form class for their Sustained Silent Reading. Interesting contrast in opinions. As far as many third form students (especially boys I must say – worrying) are concerned, reading is a pointless form of torture invented by English Teachers for purely sadistic purposes. In fact several boys opted to copy out definitions from a dictionary in preference to reading a fiction book of their own choosing from the library.

One thing that has struck me recently is how baffled I am by people who do not enjoy fiction.

I have come to understand that some people do not enjoy reading. While for me and most people I know, reading is a fun, relaxing passtime, for others it is just too difficult. If your reading skills are so poor that it takes you a full minute to struggle through a sentence and even then there may be at least three words you can’t work out, reading is confusing, frustrating and difficult. It is hard to enjoy a book if the mechanics of reading takes too long. In this society we are used to the fast-paced stories of TV and movies, and if your reading speed is very slow, then it will seem like the book story is taking forever to get started. I have often been gob-smacked by students telling me that a book I love and think is a rollicking read, is boring and slow. I have then checked their reading logs and found out that they are only reading 1 or 2 pages a day! When I start a book I do not expect to be ‘hooked’ until page 30 or so. If I was only reading a couple of pages at a time, I probably wouldn’t be very interested in most books. They simply would take too long.

To enjoy books, I need to get fully immersed and lose track of time.

The feeling when you can’t put the book down because you HAVE to know what happens next – that’s why I read. Whereas TV and movies have external factors dictating when you get your ‘fixes’ of story, whether it is a single episode at a time or a two hour movie, the pacing and time is pre-determined. With reading, the reader can choose whether to sit down one afternoon and read the book from cover-to-cover, or whether to leisurely read it a chapter at a time.

Oh my, what a long digression that turned out to be.

My original point was going to be that while I can understand why people who are not good readers do not enjoy reading, I still struggle to understand people who simply do not enjoy fiction.

There are some people who prefer not to read fiction. They prefer to read history books, political books, biographies etc. That makes some sense to me. I have read some truly fantastic non-fiction books, ones that were highly entertaining as well as interesting. I suppose they also feel a more virtuous form of reading.

I do have a slightly strange way of looking entertainment. That is that entertainment is like food and there is entertainment that is good for you and also entertainment that is not so good for you. Reading a scholarly non-fiction book is the equivalent of raw carrot sticks and salad. The health food of leisure activities. Reading fiction is still pretty intellectually healthy in my estimation. Probably the equivalent of rice or wholemeal bread. Still at the bottom of the food pyramid.

Watching a documentary or arthouse film is like the protein - cheese or lean meats. Part of a well-balanced diet.

Watching schlocky Hollywood movies. Pizza and chips.

Watching TV. Chocolate and candy. (Reality TV is the equivalent of chewing a lump of cholesterol-dripping lard).

Unfortunately, that means at the moment my intellectual diet is as unhealthy as the food. Too much mind-candy, not enough veggies.

Once again, Debbie neglects to actually get to the original point.

What I have been trying to get to is that there are some students I have who do not seem to enjoy listening to stories being read out, watching plays and do not even seem to enjoy movies. The only things they will ever read are car magazines or sports biographies. No fiction. Not in any form.

Scary.

Could it be that there is a new breed of teenager out there who just doesn’t like stories?

Did they have their imaginations sucked out by some sort of monstrous vacuum cleaner as a small child? Or is it just a phase where stories and fiction seem babyish?