ladyofastolat | On reading for pleasure

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On reading for pleasure

This is a predictable rant, because I know I've ranted about similar things before. In fact, I can probably leave half the words blank, and you'd all be able to fill them in. (Now, there's an idea for an LJ post…)

Anyway, someone at work has just given me "100 books every child should read", from this Saturday's Telegraph. It starts with an article by Michael Morpurgo about how schools should promote the sheer pleasure of books and stories.. I agree with every word he says. A terrifying number – Half? Thee quarters? I forget the exact number – of primary school teachers never read a story aloud to their children just for the fun of it. Philip Pullman read through the entire primary school Literacy Strategy and didn't find the word "enjoy" in there once. Novels are reduced to out-of-context extracts, and children are then invited to analyse the use of adjectives. Most school libraries I've seen are dire, full of tatty thirty-year-old books. Some secondary schools no longer have libraries at all "because it's all on the internet now, isn't it?" Scared by the National Curriculum, SATs and league tables, many teachers feel they can't justify spending ten minutes at the end of a day just reading for the fun of it.

So far so good, then. However, after his article, without a word of caution or introduction, we get "100 books every child should read." And what a list it is! Barely a dozen of the books were written within the last 25 years. Few are likely to appeal to reluctant readers. Apparently "early teens", for example, "should" be reading Great Expectations – a book that I'm Dickens never intended as "a children's book."

This list appears to be preaching the opposite message from Michael Morpurgo. "Push the joy of reading" doesn't match with "should". A lot of children never discover the joy of reading because their parents don't read, never encourage them to read, and never introduce them to books. Others, however, never discover the joy of reading because their parents push them too much. Over-ambitious parents can be the death of a child's interest in reading. We've all seen them in libraries: the parent who crossly snatches the child's chosen book out of their hand on the grounds that it's "too easy" or because they've "read it before", gets them a book that's clearly far too hard for the child, and then (presumably) boasts to the other parents, "Of course, she's reading books written for 9 year olds now."

Research has shown* that the children who love reading tend to do better at school. Research has shown that the best way to get a child to love reading is to let them choose their own books. Add that element of "should" and many of them lose interest. Some of them will want to relax at times with a "too easy" book. Some will want to reread an old favourite for the tenth time. Some will spend a year reading a single formulaic series, and loving it. Some will only ever read non-fiction.

This should be encouraged! By all means, try to gently introduce them to new experiences – to "better books", if you like. This is great! I have nothing at all against classics, and loved them as a child. (However, when I try to look objectively at some of them, I do wonder quite why they gained their classic status. I suspect a case of the emperor's new clothes in a few of them.) Read these aloud and enthuse over them, and perhaps the child will come to love them, too; enthusiasm is infectious, after all. But perhaps they won't. Times change. Children change. Interests change. Fashions change. Perhaps that worthy classic will leave them cold, while that "formulaic trash" inspires them and leads them to play rich games of the imagination, and to write stories of their own. It won't last, and they'll move on in time to something else - perhaps to that very classic they scorned six months earlier.

However, tear that "trash" out of their hand and tell that they will have to read this "good" book, whether they like it or not… What message are you giving about the joy of reading then? Reading is a chore. Reading is a test. Reading is something you have to do, not something you do because you enjoy it. "I am not a reader," they will come to think, and soon that prediction will come true. *

By all means, have book lists that suggest books that children might enjoy. Gently lead them to new discoveries. Recommend. Enthuse. But put a list of "100 books that a child should read" into the hands of over-ambitious parents, and I tremble at the result.

* I have read specific research on these issues, so these aren't empty statements. I'm just not citing the details here since this is an LJ rant, not an article.

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When I left school, I swore that I would never again read a book because I "ought to". I haven't.

Also, that, at eleven, we read Ivanhoe in class, but the teacher picked out all the descriptive bits (including, believe it or not, the "range of bars above the glowing charcoal" sequence where Isaac is being threatened with torture) and not things like the tournament to study. The result was that I was completely put off Scott until I picked up Ivanhoe again at fourteen (my parents had bought me a nice edition when I said I was doing it at school - they were very proud of the fact that I had passed the eleven plus and was going to the grammar school of my choice) which was exactly the right age for me, and found that, guess what, I enjoyed reading Scott after all!

My parents didn't have money to buy many books, so I read what I wanted to read from the library (boy's adventure stories and pony books and science fiction - not fantasy at all until I was about 12) and I used my pocket money to buy American comic books and Armada and Puffin paperbacks - but I had junior school teachers who certainly did read to us. Though it is now more than fifty years ago, I can still remember one teacher reading Ernest Thompson Seaton to us - which fed my passion for natural history as well as fiction.

Bah! to current educational thinking if it loses this joy for children.

And Bah! to dunderheads who can't remember what they enjoyed reading as a child.

I still have many of my childhood books and I know I'm terrible at saying "Let's read this" for G's bed-time story when she'd rather read a Daisy Meadows. I hope we hit a happy medium between things she chooses herself and things I want to share with her, but it is hard to resist the desire to share something with her I recall enjoying.

*signs up to join crusade*

I was very lucky, I was encouraged to read, but allowed to pick my own books. Once when I picked a book I subsequently found I didn't like I was told that I didn't have to read it if I didn't want to.

At primary school age reading was one of the things that I was genuinely very good at: I was awful at writing, good at maths and utterly hopeless at sport.

I did once try reading David Copperfield; it was awful! I tried really, really hard to read it; and on more than one ocasion. Luckily by that time I knew that I didn't have to finish a book.

When I was about fifteen I was getting whole armfuls of books from the mobile library that came round every two weeks and was devouring them at a rate of two or three a day. Most of them were inch-thick SF books.

Over my childhood I read several books more than once, one seventeen times. Others I went back to simply for the joy of reading them despite them being years too young for me.

I think it's great when parents (and teachers) read from something they genuinely love themselves. Even if the child ends up not taking to the book itself, simply seeing an adult they look up to enthusing about reading teaches a great messages. Enthusiasm can be really catching. I remember my whole class frequently being swept away by our teacher's enthusiasms, whether for books or other things (which is one concern I have with the National Curriculum, since it doesn't allow teachers to do this in the same way.)

I think I was quite unusual, in that I usually ended up loving all the books I "did" at school - loving them all the more as a result of studying them. I recognise that this is unusual, though. Being put off for a life seems to be a much more common result.

I devoured Walter Scott between the ages of 11 and 15 or so. I'm fairly sure I must have "done" the tournament scene at school, since I clearly remember reading that scene before I knew who the characters were, but all his other books I found voluntarily.

I do remember my parents gently suggesting that I probably shouldn't be wasting my birthday book tokens on Nancy Drew books, since I'd probably lose interest pretty soon, but they never actively stopped me. Since I was reading Tolkien and Rosemary Sutcliff and the like at the same time, I doubt they were really worried. My local library didn't approve of Nancy Drew or the Famous Five, so buying was the only option for these types.

When I'm in a school, I often say "put your hands up if you've ever started a reading book you think you'll like, got half way through it and thought 'This is boring. I don't want to read any more of this'" The children look really nervous, hands hovering, not sure if they're allowed to admit to this. I then put my hand up firmly and say, "I have." I then tell them this is perfectly okay - that I do it all the time, and I bet all their teachers have, too. (I glare at the teachers until they nod. To their credit, most teachers have already put their hands up before I have to start glaring.) The children then put their hands up with a visible sigh of relief. I find it very sad.

I do the same with asking them if they've ever read a book more than once. They're more happy to admit this without being prompted, but even then, some look guilty.

There was once a conversation between me and a beloved English mistress, which went something like this:

Her: "[Lil], one of these days I am going to get you to like Dickens!"
Me: "I don't think so, Miss, but it's okay. I like Tennyson and you don't."
Her: "True. Best leave it at that then."

Not all parents are over-ambitious, and I know some who don't read themselves but want their children to, and don't know where to start. Mightn't a list be helpful to them?

Phrases like "100 books every child should read" are just journalistic tics, I'm afraid, on the same lines as "Every government minister should be issued with a copy" or "This book should be required reading for xyz." I doubt whether even the people who drew it up actually believe that every single child should read every single book on that list - even though that's what they seem to be saying.

I thought this about The Lord of the Rings the first time I tried to read it. Admittedly I was seven at the time, my parents had got it for me because I'd enjoyed The Hobbit so much. Once it became clear the book wasn't about Bilbo, I was bitterly disappointed and gave up. It was 2 years before I picked it up again and then I was hooked and had to be prised away from it to go to bed or school :-)

I'm trying very hard to think of any book I was made to read at school that I liked *furrows brow* Nope I can't think of any.* I was made to read Great Expectations at the age of nine and found it very dark & dull. I was also put off Thomas Hardy for life by being made to study The Mayor of Casterbridge. I don't think it was so much the reading the books that put me off, it was the speed we had to read them and the interminable analysis of themes, which as far as I was concerned the authors had probably not put in deliberately (in most cases). Reading should be fun and not painful!

* Just thought of some - Shakespeare plays.

Oh yes, definitely. I just wish it had been phrased as suggestions, rather than as books they "should" read. I also wish the list had better reflected the sort of stuff today's children are really loving, not somebody's (whose?) idea of what they should be loving. If you'd asked a group of children's librarians to put together a list of "books that are likely to inspire children to love reading" it wouldn't have looked much like this list in question.

You're great.

I'm sure they didn't mean it that way - though there was no introduction or note of any kind to qualify it, or even to say who had put together the list. It just annoys me, since I've seen parents believe a list like this as if it was gospel. They come into the library clutching it, and borrow every book they can find off the list, not bothering to open it to check for level, or to read the blurb to see if it matches their child's interests. The stakes are so high. If children are struggling a bit with reading, they can so quickly generalise from "I don't like this book" to "all books are boring", and go on to believe this for life.

Great Expectations at 9? Wow! This is just... crazy! I was reading adult classics at 10, but that was my own choice, and it was fun adventurous stuff like Dumas, which is easy for a child to get excited by. Dickens is... well, not the choice. It always amazes me that nineteenth century adult books somehow end up as books considered suitable for children.

Oh! I've just remembered one book I did that school that I hated: Sons and Lovers.

Creatrix read the Silmarillion at 9. But then, she's weird.

I was doing the same outside of school, but then it was quite easy as I could just pick & choose what I wanted from my parent's shelves. If it turned out to be a bit dull I'd put it back & try something else.

Dumas is great fun :-D Though I suspect if my Mum had remembered the details of the story, she wouldn't have considered some bits suitable for the 9 year old me ;-)

Another instalment in our national saga of mismanaged expectations and misplaced uneducated competitiveness that could harm generations... *sigh*

She is that.

If their parents are really stupid enough to believe everything they read in the newspapers, then I'm thinking that being forced to read Great Expectations is not by any means the worst thing they are likely to do to their children...

You've pinpointed that a lot of the problem is a generation educated under a government who didn't believe that most people needed anything more than functional literacy, and so weren't encouraged to question the messages received through the media...

I seem to remember that every English class we were given a choice of books, and every time my moronic classmates and their monobrowed teacher would plump for the least interesting and more tedious one on offer.

Oh nonsense! Hours and hours of critical source analysis in history O level and from my vague memory of teaching it, just as much in history GCSE. It was all about the viewpoints and bias and the 'can we believe this' stuff, surely that has not changed?

And I don't believe that cynicism about government messages and national media has anything to do with education either.

The great skill needed here is getting under someone else's skin and understanding their learning experience and how it's different to your own, and I am not sure that is something that can or should be taught by the state. It's something that you absorb osmotically by bouncing off different people and opinions as you move through life.

Some people are just born with a sort of shell round them like a conker, and can't do it. Or so I believe.

example: on a dog rescue forum, several people who are in a specialist way well known were asked by the media to comment on a particular dog-related news story. A couple of them were seriously misquoted, yet even with the people who actually said the quotes right there going 'this is not what I said' people were posting 'did you see what X said, I would have thought she would have known better'.

If someone won't believe the media has just made something up when the person about whom it was made up is right there telling you, then I'm not sure what more effective learning technique you could possibly use. Maybe you shut them in a box and zap them with electrodes whenever they show any sign of believing the written word...

So with you, as is so often the case.

I love how my parents managed the reading thing. They read constantly, so books always seemed as natural as breathing. They read to us, so they were sharing their enthusiasm. Whenever one of us developed an interest in something, at least one age-appropriate book suddenly appeared out of thin air. We were never told not to read a book a second time or not to read something that might be trashy. We were never forced to read any particular books outside of what we were assigned in school.

The result? We all love books. Books are our friends. One brother uses them mostly in a research way, but that was always the case even as a child. He was more inclined to hard facts than Chelemby and me, but he still adores Little Bear and Lord of the Rings as well.

At seven, I was reading Frances Hodgeson Burnett (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, NOT Little Lord Fauntleroy which I've never been able to stomach) and relatively basic books about Henry VIII...but I was also reading Dr. Seuss. Mom never made any attempt to stop me reading little kiddie books. I think she figured a fondness for Dr. Seuss and Amelia Bedelia showed that I was enjoying both the sound and the sense of words, and those were precisely the qualities she was hoping for.

At fourteen, I read War and Peace for the first time, quickly followed by Sybil and The Stranger...then followed up all that heavy reading with another go at Charlotte's Web. Every single book on that list was my choice.

Books have always been my friends. Today, those friends include works by Great Authors and more recent 'throwaway' fiction, intense scholarly studies and lightweight overviews of Stuff That Sounds Kind of Interesting.

Buf if books had been what they all too often were in my later schooling, I might well not be interested in reading today. I know I would have detested Shakespeare if my 'formal introduction' to him in high school had been my real introduction. We were instructed to read Othello silently at our desks during class, and then as a final had to write out one of Iago's speeches word and punctuation perfect from memory and write a one-paragraph explanation of what it meant. Thank goodness my junior high drama class had been taken to see a gloriously raucus and bawdy production of The Taming of the Shrew about three years earlier and I'd seen Olivier's Henry V!

At least we never had to study random bits out of context anywhere I went to school. That sounds beyond ghastly. If we were studying a book or a story, we read the whole thing.

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On reading for pleasure

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