Reader's Guide

The longer I teach, the more difficult it is to justify reading to my students.  They find so many other things more interesting, things I generally consider passive and boring.  But then, when I was a kid, I used to occasionally be told to put down a book and go outside.  I was a little too passive for my very active family.  However, I suspect if you're reading this, you have a bit of the native reader in you, too.  You know everything I'm about to say.

Here's what I try to convey to my students when they ask why they have to read:

Reading takes us anywhere we want to go.  I've been all over the world through the magic transporter of the written word.  I'm not lucky enough to have traveled Europe yet, but I know the pace of the cities, the pastoral countrysides, the desolation of the third world.  Even pedestrian places can become familiar; Anne Tyler's books have shown me almost a whole suburb of Baltimorians through the last 20 years. 

No age or time in history is a stranger to a reader.   People of all generations wish for some other time and place to experience.   Those of us who long for Jane Eyre's England can live it through her over and over again.  How many men have craved even a glimpse of the old American West and satisfied their craving with Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey?  The last few years' burgeoning crop of novels about monarchs real and imagined shows that we never lose our desire to see into another time and place, perhaps as an escape, or even as a lesson in history.

The lessons themselves that we learn are essential to understanding literature and why it's important to us.  As early as the first nursery rhymes, we are taught about right and wrong.  Aesop's Fables trades entirely on teaching morals.  How many lessons are there from Frankenstein?  Mary Shelley wasn't just writing a horror story; it was an ethical lesson on man's frailties and hubris. 

Vicarious experience is one the primary reasons I love to read.  One of the first "grown-up" books I remember reading was The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which Mom got for me about the time the miniseries came out.  I don't know how much previous knowledge I had of the struggles African-Americans had faced, but that book laid it all out for me, from Civil War to Civil Rights---only ten years after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.  To say it shaped my understanding of the world would be a gross understatement.  I read Larry McMurtry's novels, the ones in modern-day settings, because the people he writes about are both vaguely familiar and really strange, often quite funny, and completely heartbreaking in many cases.  But I always want the experience of knowing his characters.  Through books, we can know (or become) different people having experiences we might never have a chance to otherwise.

Through reading we learn history, inform our minds, and expand our understanding.  We use our imaginations and build new brain synapses.  We find cheap entertainment in books, but more importantly, we find something of ourselves that is priceless when we are moved by a passage.  The right book can be a friend, an advisor, a teacher, an inspiration.  Books feed our minds, hearts, and spirits in a way few other things can. 

Here's to good reading for us all.