To be fair, I'm not entirely sure right at the moment that the two topics aren't in some way related.

I seem to have reached the conclusion that, for some reason, after a certain age, it seems that children start to either pressure one another, or be pressured by grownups(identities of whom are as yet uncertain), into dropping reading for fun as a worthy pastime in itself. At least, such was my impression in childhood. It's been reinforced more than once by conversations overheard on the bus from time to time. As if using your brain made you a Problem rather than a peer as time went on.

I do worry that perhaps such perceptions on my part are perhaps nothing more than projecting my own past onto other peoples' behaviour, the symptom of a man growing grumpier as he ages. I'm putting this out here to try to find out how much is just projecting and how much is based on seeing what's actually going on around me.

Do I have reason to rant or not?

I think this is an important subject, and it's something I've been thinking about on my own for some time. I'm curious to hear Dewline's rant.

It breaks my heart to see a boy I babysit, who recently turned 11, view reading as a chore. His class requires him to read 20 minutes a night, and even when given a comic book for a TV show he likes, he must be forced to do it and watches the clock. He seemed interested in Harry Potter when it was read to him, but didn't want to continue when it meant reading it on his own.

I feel sorry for him. When I was his age, reading was my escape from an uncomfortable and difficult time - heck, when I was his age, a friend lent me Alanna: The First Adventure and it was love at first page. But I was embarrased. I can remember telling my fellow sixth-graders at the lunch table about things I read by saying "I saw in this movie..." That was before I finally accepted that I was a nerd and that wasn't so bad after all.

On the other hand, I didn't like many of the stories in our "reading books" at school or the books that were assigned to read. Or, at least, I didn't like being tested on them. It got better in college, when we were assigned more interesting literature to read, but because reading for class still felt like "work," I didn't always get it done.

I wonder what it does take to instill a love of reading. Being read to as a child? A natural disposition? Finding something that interests you? (I think there was a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin is given a book about snakes and thinks if you don't do it for school, it counts as fun.) I'll have to ask my parents what they did - my sister and I are both readers.

I think hardline English teachers can be partially to blame for this one. For example, what nitwit thought we really couldn't get through grade seven without reading and dissecting Melville's Billy Budd. (I am a girl with a decent vocabulary, and I loved to read, and BB drove me up the wall. In the first chapter, I bumped into "cynosure", broke out a dictionary, and kept having to break my reading every five or ten pages. For somebody who reads fast and loves to read, that's like throwing up the little speed bumps in the parking lot.)

Also, I think a parents attitude toward reading goes a long way towards shaping the child's. If parents never read, and the child never sees them reading for fun, chances are the kid won't know it is fun. Most of the people I know that don't read watched a lot of TV with their family as a child. My family got a TV eventually, but you'd be as likely to spot us reading together, or even reading while somebody else watched TV. My youngest brother is the only one of us that lived with a TV from very young childhood, and he reads slightly less than the rest of us, and has more of a tendency to be sucked in by it. (BTW, I am not a complete TV hater--I think you can certainly balance entertainment between books and TV, just that most TV households....don't.)

On a post at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog, Making Light, while people were discussing why a lot of non-readers were all over Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and so enthusiastic about it, despite obvious flaws, somebody once postulated that people were reading FOR FUN, and never having read FOR FUN, had no idea that their sense of pleasure came not so much from the book, but rather from reading. Thus, they would pick up DVC but then not read another book for months.

I think this a complex, multi-faceted issue. Three things off the top of my head are:

1) Does person like fiction at all? My Dad, my brother, and my office mate don't. All are well informed but they read only to gain information related to an interest or their profession. All three of these view fiction with a more or less "what's the point?" attitude.

Outside of a few graphic novels we've lent him, my brother hasn't read fiction in years (as an aside he liked the GN's based on real people/things the best), but he'll tear through a very technical book on orchids because he's an avid orchid grower. We recently lent him several DVDs. There's not a documentary left in the house.

If you ever want an experience in tear-your-hair-out comedy, put my dad in a room and start playing one of the LOTR movies. The extent to which he does not "get" the story structure, character motivations, symbolism, etc. is flabbergasting ... and trying to explain any of it? Quit while you're ahead.


2) Social Class/occupation. A college friend of mine (fellow English major) was a disspointment/mystery to her family. She loved reading. It meant a lot to her when her father built her a bookcase as a teenager. But both her parents, and pretty much the rest of her family had the POV that if you were reading it was time spent not working on something useful. The very few books that they (parents) had were all about how to do/make something.

I also had a friend whose (rich) parents discouraged her from reading fiction so that, again, she could do something "useful" with her time.

3) Good, old-fashioned, anti-intellectual Americanism. Yeah, "knowing too much" is a bad thing in the US. It's often something that we work at to try and hide/downplay. And, yeah, I have seen parents ask us to not buy any books for their child for christmas, because "they don't want to raise an egghead".

IMHO it's the same sort of mentality that makes a big deal of the Jocks, but doesn't say anything about the mathletes, debate team, or the students that place in the top levels at the State (in my case, California) Science Fair.

~grrrr~

---

From time to time I surf into "Cribs" on MTV. Only 3 times have I seen books/magazines in somebody's house: Moby, One of the NSYNC guy's house, and Rod Stewart's daughter.

And I watch and I think "what do these people do with their time?" How do you not have books or magazines in your house?

There's an interesting post about this as well on Screaming into the Void.

I find it frustrating trying to get people to read things that are more than a few paragraphs at most. It's like they're afraid they'll get lost.

(I guess that I'm a) too old for this rant at 31 and b) too (European) middle class.)

However, I'll definitely ask a good friend of mine who is a librarian for youth books in a big and difficult city (lots of immigrants, parents without jobs, kids who don't speak the language...) about her opinion on this topic, because reading is very dear to my heart.

And if there's any good idea around to get kids started reading, or to encourage reading, please let me know, because I'd be happy to suggest implementing it in my community"

I can only say for myself that as I grew up, I did not know anyone who did *not* read. No matter if it were boys or girls. And in my whole family, close and extended, to this date, there is no one who *doesn't* like to read - and most of them are not academics.
When I was a teenager, I read all of the Alanna books aloud to my mother, and my friends and I devised questionnaires about them to solve in our breaks at school. We could recite - I kid you not - whole pages by heart.

Afaik reading is an indicator for a general attitude towards education. Concerning this I have the impression that we are witnessing two extremes: parents who are overly concerned about how their children perform, who enroll three year olds in five different courses to push them towards excellence - and parents who care so little about their kids that sixth graders don't know how to use a fork (and that's a real life example that my mother - who's a teacher - told me about).

During some research in educational policies I read about a study that said it is mainly the mother's attitude towards education that influences children (AND their ability to read and write at a certain age) - no matter if the mother is a career woman or a stay-at-home mom.

I found that a very interesting result. Because that indicates a near endless cycle of discouragement. Girls are discouraged from reading, from living up to their (academic) potential - they grow up to be mothers who don't even know how to read a bed-time story to their son - the son never really learns how to enjoy reading, never learns to care for education ... a downwards spiral that is very disheartening.

My initial thought was: has anyone ever heard of courses designed to encourage new moms or moms-to-be to read bed-time-stories and to tell stories, and if they don't know how to do that, maybe to teach them?

...but a pop website I frequent, popjustice.com, put it best whilst referring to a magazine:


Publisher: Hey kids! Here's a new magazine.
Kids: What's a magazine?
Publisher: Well, it's like a book...
Kids: Oh piss off.
Publisher: No wait! It's in full colour, and you can read it on the bus on the way to school...
Kids: We read our text messages on the way to school.
Publisher: Okay - well we've mocked up a magazine to show you. Take a look at THIS!
Kids: Where are the videos?
Publisher: What?
Kids: Where's the button to press play on the videos?
Publisher: Well, no, you see these are just photographs...
Kids: We've already downloaded all these photographs from the internet. How do we use this to talk to each other?
Publisher: Well, there's a letters page...
Kids: How do we know when our friends are reading the same magazine?
Publisher: Well, you don't...
Kids: Hang on, this still says that Ray might win X Factor...
Publisher: Well, you see we had to write this last week because it takes a long time to print onto paper...
Kids: But shouldn't that have changed to say Leona by now?
Publisher: You can't change it - it's printed on paper!
Kids: So it doesn't update?
Publisher: Well, no, but... Well anyway. How much would you pay for this magazine, do you think?
Kids: Pay? You have got to be fucking joking.

Speaking as the parent of a fourteen year old, her love of reading was something her father and I instilled in her before she could even speak properly.

I think like a lot of educational matters, we have a generation that has grown up assuming that a love of reading is one of those spontaneously occuring phenomena, or it's something the schools will take care of.

Which ends up being particularly ridiculous when you consider the parents making this assumption certainly didn't have that experience themselves.

As parents, we're all told "read to your children". And if we don't get this memo, most elementary schools these days structure reading homework such that parents end up reading to their children (or lying about reading to their children) whether they feel like it or not.

What I believe is that parents (and it *is* up to us, ultimately) need to broaden our approach to the issue. No child living -- particularly a pre-teen -- is going to respond favorably to "reading is good for you".

Instead, what you do is you take that position as a starting point -- to whit: reading is good for you, so you will do a certain amount of reading every day.

Then, give the child books that are *relevent*. I know I'm going to come across as somewhat of a suck-up here, Tammy, but Protector of the Small came into our lives at a perfect time for Robin. She's a very athletic girl, more comfortable with boys, and not afraid to take on a challenge just because she's "a girl".

She's also historically had a lot of difficulty with her temper, particularly when people tease her, so when she read about Kel's "Yemani-face", I suggested that she try using that as a coping technique.

I guess my point is, she never would have found the books if I hadn't placed them in her path. She never would have *responded* to them if I hadn't timed her exposure in such a way that I could then take the lessons of the book and relate them to her own personal experience.

Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's the kind of one on one labor of love type work we *should* aspire to as parents. The child has a question about racism? Read "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" together, and discuss how the story relates to whatever the child sees going on around them.

Child (presumably older) has a question about the War on Terror? Give them Terry Pratchett's "Jingo", and then try and draw parallels.

The possibilities are *endless*.

This entire topic is one that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel too young to feel so old and crotchety when it comes to reading. I'm seventeen. I shouldn't have to feel like an old lady saying "When I was your age..." whenever I recommend books to girls three years my junior. I love to read, and it scares me to see that so many people my age hate it.

There've been a lot of people in my parents' social circles commenting on how excellent it is that our local library seems to be filled with children nowadays. Seemingly they don't realize that said children look at me funny when I ask if I can squeeze past the queue for the OMG FREE INTERNET to see the side of the "teen" shelf (yes, shelf, singular—and most of the non-fantasy is shallow stereotype-reinforcing tripe, I'm sorry to say) closer to the computers. They look at me even more strangely when I suggest that hey, maybe you should try reading something to occupy your time while you wait (rather than running about knocking stuff over and making it impossible for this girl to research).

I don't know if the blame rests with society, the parents, or television, but it scares me to see kids surrounded by books not reading anything but chatspeak on a glowing screen. When I was six I picked up Congo by Michael Crichton in an airport bookstore and was instantly hooked. Maybe it's that terrifyingly precocious little girl coming out again, but there've been times when I want to curl up and sob at the way my fellow teenagers act about reading. It's fun, why can't everyone else see that?

I suppose the way things are presented in school doesn't help much. Being told to read something can make it seem like work. But... relying on the geeky short girl who's always reading to tell you what happened in act two of the play assigned in English isn't the same as experiencing it for yourself. (Even if Long Day's Journey Into Night is depressing, I still loved it—as I have most of the books we've been assigned this year. Guess this is the fun part of being a senior, eh?)

Am I crazy for enjoying plowing headfirst through books just to be a stubborn cuss and say things like "yes, I read Crime and Punishment, and it was both?" Am I crazy for reading all the poetry in our textbook because, hey, the writers picked out the good stuff so we don't all have to wade through seas of ninteenth-century Emo to find it? I'd like to think not, but when you hear everyone but your closest friends complain about the reading list for an AP class... it gets to you.

I know the problem's there, I know I should do something myself about it... but what can I do? Where should I start?

Making kids into readers is - aside from the few with dyslexia - not hard. I read to my kids, almost endlessly. I read in front of them. I talked about books. We investigated all the local libraries. I still get strange looks when I explain that house rules said that you can only borrow as many books as you can personally carry and Mom won't visit the same library more than twice a day. My kids are readers and can be counted on to put books in the hands of others.

For the most part the kids who've never become readers are easy. They just don't know, and all you have to do is let them know. My standard technique is to read something good out loud to younger kids within hearing distance. Audio books work too.

The ones who stop - I'd say that it's less often peer pressure than time and access. Kids need adult help to get to a library. I know literate and intelligent adults who never bring their kids to the library because keeping track of the library books and getting them back on time is too much trouble. The school library in the high school my daughter graduated from last spring is only accessible to the students if a teacher brings a class there to work on a project. There are no free periods, and staying after school is forbidden unless you are attending a club meeting or a sports practice. Students found in the halls after hours are escorted off the property. The school administration does not see this policy as either unusual or problematic. Homework loads are important too. My kids are readers, but they've had whole years where there just wasn't time to read anything that hadn't been assigned by a teacher.

I've seen adults pressure kids not to read. Watching tv is seen as a social thing, while reading is solitary. So my children have been told by their grandmother to put the book away and come watch tv with her, because she wanted to spend time with them.

Kit

reading has, for so long, been an escape for me. I started reading when I was really young (my older brother didn't learn until he was 7+, and my mother drilled him with flashcards. He didn't learn well, but I did. I am four years younger than him), and soon learned that the tv wasn't portable, and books were. TV held very, very little interest for me as a kid. I also had next to no friends at school, because I followed my older brother from school to school each year as he switched from special ed class to special ed class. honestly, a school a year up to seventh grade. So I sat on the playground, and I read. I read everythign in sight. I was reading at a third grade level in kindergarten, a seventh grade level by third grade, and at twelfth or higher by fifth grade. My mother didn't do playdates, I didn't have afterschool activities, I didn't have friends on my block, and it's not like my mother spent time with me. So I read.

I was never crazy about the books in school, but it wasn't a problem for me to read a dumb hundred and twenty page book and then get back to what I wanted to read. We had SSR (sustained silent reading), DEAR (drop everything and read), and AR (accelerated reader) at different schools I was at, and once I had read the books to gain the number of points I needed for a year, teachers let me read what I wanted. This continued up through high school, and to today (sophomore year of college). I always got to classes early, and I just pull out whatever I'm reading. I read myself to sleep each night for a long time, and still do fairly often. If I have a really bad headache, or dont' want to fall asleep with my glasses on, I use itunes money to put books on tape on my computer. But I honestly think that reading is something that will always be an escape for me. I may not be able to physically get out of lousy living situations, but I always have books.

I also think that is one of the reasons I can read books over and over and over. It's like visiting somebody or someplace I really liked over and over - i hate libraries cos I don't get to keep the books.

I also tried as hard as I could to make my younger siblings like to read - I succeeded entirely with one, and the younger one is starting to pull around. neither has the insatiable love of reading I do, but they can't say that they've never read a book for pleasure.

school may have something to do with it, but I think that most kids can get back a few bad books in english class if they really want to. I was never really teased for reading, except like, when I pull out a book in a long line at an amusement park or something. I've run into a lot of kids who think it's just crazy that I like to read for fun, but they don't mock me for it, and didn't when I was younger. A few kids in my class thought I was lame for liking SSR, AR, and DEAR so much, but they got over it when I stopped reacting.

on a side note - I'm not sure if I'm THE person you were talking about when you said you know somebody with a relative who sends her emails telling her college is a waste of my time, though i have a strong feeling I was. That really doesn't effect me in terms of wanting to get an education or keep reading or anything like that. It makes me think my sister married the dumbest piece of crud on the face of the planet, but I know his opinion is pathetic and it changes nothing for me other than not seeing my nephews when I'm in town as frequently as I'd like.

I am a nanny for four kids, two of which are third graders. They have to read at least 20 minutes a day. They spent so much time asking me if they were done yet that I finally had to say "if you ask then I add on five minutes." they weren't reading. And one of them even likes to read - he just feels like this is something in his way before he can go out and play with friends. I think of teachers didnt' set a time minimum that this would work a lot better. I'm not sure of another way to govern it, but giving a amount of time you HAVE to read makes it a chore. Kids hate chores, plain and simple.

So many factors go into whether a child becomes a reader or not. It seems so obvious to us and so easy to point to the successes and to wonder at others' failures to get children to read.

As a former public (and private) school teacher, I cannot and will not argue about the negative impact the whole 'basal reader' program has had - and yet, as bookdivalia observed, plenty of kids get past one or two (or dozens of) bad books.

Kit notes that "making kids into readers is not hard."

And I have to disagree. There are kids for whom that is not a challenge. There are kids for whom it is an overwhelming challenge.

Yes, being raised without television seems to increase readership... until you consider the families that are doing the raising of kids without television! It is a self-selecting population. Is the predisposition towards reading at all genetic? It may be. Certainly the folks whose research I follow are not at all sure.

It does seem tied to personality, though.

I have watched so many families struggle to get their obviously bright child to read. I watched and listened to the struggles my own sister and her (adopted, very bright) daughter went through over reading. I did some of the initial assessment work myself, to see if there was a problem masked by intelligence. She would read and not get any meaning from what she read. So, why bother? (Yes, happy resolution...)

The pressures to which dewine alludes are there, not only for reading but for academic performance and even involvement at all. Thinking, reflection, deliberation are not a part of the standard operating procedures of most kids - OR THEIR PARENTS.

Conversely, the kids who read in spite of their parents, their schools, and their agemates (NOT peers) are legion. They may hide it, they may not discuss it, but they are readers. Kit and Tammy and I know folks who, as collegiate athletes, hid their aptitude and their love of reading from their teammates.

But they did not STOP reading. They just went underground to do it.

Schools teach kids to read. Sometimes, they teach kids not to. "Don't worry, she may have come into kindergarten ahead of the others in reading, but by third grade, we'll have her with the others!" as more than one principal has said in my hearing.

Parents teach kids to read. Siblings teach kids to read.

And kids teach themselves to read.

One of my favorite exchanges on this was between a pediatrician and a mom. The 3 year old was reading in the corner and the pediatrician said: "How did you get her to do that?"

Mom: "How did I get her to do that?! How do I get her to STOP?!"

I do get the impression, among the girls I've known at least (but maybe I'm self-selecting, too) that reading is a little more socially acceptable than it was when I was a kid--and that even the kids who weren't hard core readers read a little for fun. Harry Potter may get some credit for that.

The girl I know who is a truly hard core reader (and who I swap books with) does get comments about how much she reads sometimes--the ones I've heard haven't been cruel, just curious, but I've seen her in Scouting, not in school, which may be very very different.

Those houses without books freak me out, and I do get the feeling they're actually much more common than the sort of house that feels more normal to me, the kind where you're running out of shelf space for the books and wall space for the shelves.

I agree with kadymae that this issue is very multifaceted. Others have commented in detail on the way school seems designed to make you hate reading (I remember with loathing the month (!) we spent slogging through Great Expectations in 9th grade), and on how culturally there's a disrespect of reading, especially reading for pleasure.

I just want to add two things.

First, there's a lot of people who don't read because they can't. Not well, anyway. They've never learned how to turn print into words in their heads in a way that does not make the entire process difficult and frustrating. One of my classmates in high school, when asked to read aloud from the text book, would come up with something like this (commas indicate pauses):

"To be or, not to be that, is the question
Whether, 'tis nobler in, the mind to suffer
The slings, and arrows of outrageous, fortune
Or to, take arms against a, sea of troubles
And by, opposing end them to, die to sleep" (and so on)

In short, while technically literate, he was unable to read with any fluency or ease. And this was after more than 10 years of private (Catholic) school education. At the same time, however, this kid owned all the AD&D game manuals (the first edition ones, which were very heavy on text and light on graphics and pictures) and played D&D, which is hardly a game for illiterates, so he _could_ read, if sufficiently motivated. It just wasn't easy for him.

Second, while English-speaking cultures seem to disrespect books, it's not universal. Reading for pleasure is taken for granted in places like Iceland, which has the highest per-capita level of book consumption in the world. So the reason why so few people in English speaking cultures read is not because they are stupid, or because books just can't compete with the seductions of TV, IM, video games and the Internet, because people in Iceland have all that stuff, too, and it hasn't stopped them from reading.

Well, I have to go wrap the 40-odd books I got for my partner this Christmas, so I'll leave it at that. Just wanted to say, before I go, Tamora, that I'm really enjoying your blog.

Drive-by commenter here, but one of the recurring commments I've seen that's really seized my brain is that idea of reading as non-social and television (and other activities) as social. Is one of the many answers to reclaim reading as a social activity?

My parents were always pretty good at presenting it as such. When I was young, either my mother or father would read a chapter of a book with me a night, and we'd alternate pages. Once they stopped doing that, I started reading Redwall and the Narnia books to my little brother, and would attempt to do various British accents for him. Audibooks were used to keep me and said little brother from fighting on long car trips.

I'm also lucky in that I attend a university (and am majoring in a department) where reading out loud, to a group, is valued. For instance, this semester, my Latin professor organized a "Homerathon", where we read the entire Odyssey from beginning to end. It was fairly informal, and each person who wanted to read could get up and do so for about fifteen minutes at a time. (There was also delicious baklava.) We're even thinking of doing another all-night Homerathon for the Illiad, and have plans for making t-shirts that say "Achilles Kept Me Up All Night." In addition, my school has a lot of writers who come to do readings of their work, and my creative writing class culiminated with a reading at a local Barnes and Noble.

I know my experience isn't common, and I also know that most kids these days aren't instilled with the attention spans to deal with reading out loud. But to just give up sounds a bit defeatist, and I'm sure there's ways that schools can turn reading into something social again. After all, a lot of classic literature is better when read out loud, and kids might unerstand it more that way.

I was never that kid. I was the teenager who bought books instead of clothes and was (and still am) the college student who will choose books over food if the decision needed to be made, regardless of the teasing my obsession for reading has always brought me.

I remember when I was twelve, I picked up Philip Pullman's Northern Lights/The Golden Compass and very quickly fell in love. This led to my picking up The Subtle Knife immediately in its massive hardback form and bringing it to school for reading. My teacher had a firm belief that everyone in the class should read for fun for at least half an hour in the school day (much to the dismay of the majority of my class), and I was one of the few allowed bring in her own books as I'd already devoured the majority of the school library. Apart from the usual reaction of my classmates staring at the size of the book I'd brought in this time, I'd also made the decision when buying The Subtle Knife to not buy another book by a popular Irish author who primarily writes for girls. This other book was very popular in my class, but in my mind there had been no difficult choice involved.

I should also point out that I was the only one in my class who liked fantasy, which put me at odds even more. When I mentioned I'd chosen The Subtle Knife over the other book, the most popular girl in my class immediately shot me down and belittled my choice of book and my choice of book size. Thankfully, I didn't listen to her.

I've grown up with this attitude for so long that it's always a pleasant surprise to meet people who don't consider reading a chore. Even when I did an English degree, I was constantly amazed by the amount of people who would complain at our reading workload. I never understood why people would choose a degree with an insane amount of reading required when they didn't enjoy it.

I still meet with this attitude even now - I was rereading Jane Eyre for fun a few weeks ago and when I corrected someone who thought I was reading it for school, I received the longest disbelieving stare known to man.

I've been temping in a bookstore over Christmas these past few weeks and I've spent an amount of time in the children's section. I've heard a lot about kids liking reading and fantasy more thanks to Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings (and it's obviously helped your books become longer, which is never a bad thing), but most of the kids stared at me like I'd grown a second head whenever I brought up something along those lines. On the other hand, seeing the amount of kids come in all enthusiastic and set on an afternoon flicking through books before choosing one or more has definitely made up for it.

I do think it's more than peer pressure, however: a boy of around twelve asked me what I thought of Northern Lights and was definitely interested when I explained the basic plot without giving it away; his mother then came over, took one look at the size of the book, and informed him he wouldn't finish it and gave me a furious look for my efforts. Another one of my fellow temps butted in when I was explaining the same book to another parent who had also seemed interested in it, and warned him that he'd found the book hard going and very dark. I wasn't furious with him about that (hey, every kid is different after all), but I was annoyed with him since the parent had told me his kid liked fantasy and was an avid reader who didn't mind length. I don't believe in discouraging parents or kids themselves on what they think they can or cannot manage, regardless on how realistic they believe their efforts are.