On reading
“Reading is to the mind what exercise
is to the body.” Richard Steele
“Yeh, man ... The more you read
the more you know and the more you consciousness-build.” Michael
Smith, Jamaican poet
Reading has been a lifelong passion.
As a child I lived in a suburb where there were no other girls my age,
only horrible little boys like my brother, so I spent a lot of time reading
– usually up the flamboyant tree on the front lawn. I’d climb up
with my latest book and some orange juice and biscuits, and sit there swaying
among the leaves, reading and dreaming. My mother spent a lot of
time calling up at me to come down.
I also had that most essential necessity for
young readers: a mother prepared to schlep miles into the Durban Library
once a week. I remember vividly the hushed atmosphere and the high
ceilings and specially the book bindings: dark brown and maroon leather
with the titles embossed in gold. I devoured the Junior library and
enjoyed the series that went on and on: William, Jo of the Chalet School
and specially Arthur Ransome.
When I began to get excited about Arthur Ransome,
my grandparents gave me the wonderful gift of a book once a month for a
year. Each month I was able to go into Griggs bookshop in West Street
and one by one bought the whole series of twelve, putting them down on
my grandparents’ account. Our daughters enjoyed them just as much
as I did, and I have them still, waiting for our own grandchildren – if
they can be lured away from their computer games. Grandparents can
play a large role in getting kids interested in reading, by telling stories,
reading to them and buying them books to keep.
Our children became bookworms for the same
reason as I did: we lived out of town with no friends close by – and there
was no TV until they were teenagers.
Reading should be an adventure, as it was to
the Victorians who devoured the books that suddenly became available in
the new lending libraries. They weren’t fazed by the idea that reading
is an intellectual activity. They read because they wanted to know
and learn things and be entertained. Like them, I believe that all
reading is good reading. Most of my generation swapped Classic Comics
(the greats of English literature in drag) with as much alacrity as Superman
and Batman & Robin.
Children who read easily can entertain themselves
and enrich their knowledge independently, and generally sail through school.
An adult who has gone to the trouble of learning to read at evening classes
after a full day’s work deserves at the very least a choice of accessible
books relating to his or her life experience.
Reading is the essential skill for education,
but our society is not serious enough about encouraging it. Kids
who love to be told stories when they’re little and gallop through books
as soon as they learn to read, get switched off gradually by too much TV
and school sport and other activities – not to mention indifferent teachers
– until they go off books completely by the time they hit their teens.
This is a national disaster.
I wish that all our South African children
had the freedom to pick up a book and settle down with it. We have
shelves full of wonderful local books now, but most are too expensive for
the average family. We need cheaper books, READ box libraries in
every classroom, town libraries that reach out to areas where there are
no libraries, and circulating library buses to serve the rural areas.
Libraries should be places where kids can go
to be told stories and choose books for themselves and be able to sit on
cushions or lie on the carpet comparing them with other kids – making happy
noises, opening books like treasure boxes or windows on to exciting new
worlds, as many as you like; the best kind of time travel.
I hope that our schools will one day have more
familiar African than foreign books on their required reading lists.
I hope that when young people are required to study a Shakespeare play,
they are given the opportunity to see it unfolding on the stage as well,
or to watch one of the exciting recent films (Twelfth Night, Romeo &
Juliet, Richard III, Branagh’s Hamlet) so they can glory in
vivid language made understandable by splendid actors.
Apart from the few schools where reading is
actively encouraged, only libraries and librarians seem to be carrying
the torch for reading. The media in general either ignore or dismiss
books, giving scant space to book reviews, preferring to dwell on the private
lives of authors and how much money the top books make. This is curious
behaviour in light of the fact that the circulations of newspapers and
magazines are plummeting. You’d think that they’d be going all out
to encourage more readers (their future customers!) rather than devoting
so much space to TV programmes and the Internet.
The books that are reviewed – in the
English media at least – are usually foreign and too expensive for most
readers. The older treasures available in our libraries are seldom
discussed or highlighted. Scant attention is paid to the needs of
book clubs and readers who are eager for recommendations but don’t know
where to start looking. Worst of all, most of the criticism comes
from a lofty literary standpoint which goes right over the heads of the
vast majority of readers. (It’s different in the Afrikaans community,
which is far more supportive of its writers than any of our other language
groups).
Readers are ill-served by reviewers who either
write elaborate literary spiels aimed at impressing their peers, or blatantly
copy the blurbs on the dust jackets. Apart from the few quality newspapers
and magazines, most spaces devoted to books give grudging centimetres to
one-paragraph reviews. Reliable information about what’s good to
read has to spread by word of mouth, at book club meetings, or via our
few good bookshops and librarians who are becoming frantic about their
dwindling budgets for new books.
Some
quotes on books
“Books are the carriers
of civilisation. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb,
science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without
books, the development of civilisation would be impossible. They
are engines of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses’ (as a poet said)
‘erected in the sea of time’. They are companions, teachers, magicians,
bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
Barbara Tuchman
“A book lying idle on a shelf is
wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation.
Lend and borrow to the maximum – of both books and money! But especially
books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is
not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed
a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass
it on, you are enriched threefold.”
Henry Miller
“The book has great advantages over
the computer: it is light and it’s cheap. That it has changed little
in over 400 years suggests an uncommonly apt design. You can drop
a book in the bathtub, dry it out on the radiator and still read it.
You can put it in the attic, pull it out 200 years later, and probably
decipher the words. However much dictionaries and encyclopaedias might
be superseded, a well-thumbed paperback blowing in a beach breeze represents
a technological stronghold the computer may never invade.”
D T Max
“A great book should leave you with
many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.”
William Styron
