If We Want Children to Read for Pleasure

My family moved to Athens, Greece when I was in 4th grade. This is when I first became aware of Scholastic Books. Mom let my brother and me order as many books as we wanted and so month after month, I would receive a stack of cheap paperbacks that I would then consume before the next Scholastic brochure arrived. I'm sure that at some level her motivations were educational, but I think the main point was that we were living in a country in where the media was in a language we didn't understand, and she wanted us to be at least minimally entertained.

I don't specifically recall many of the books, but there was an engrossing one about the Bermuda Triangle and another aspirational one about high school football. My lifelong fandom of The Who started with a very sanitized band biography. And I really got into Eric von Däniken's pseudoscientific theories about space aliens having visited earth in ancient times. In other words, none of it was great literature, but I didn't care. I was reading for pleasure.

When the books arrived, I would stack them on a table in my bedroom, then move them to another stack as I completed them. I might not remember much of the content of these books, but I've never forgotten the feeling of accomplishment upon reading the final words on the final page. I would close the back cover, then hold the finished book in my hands for a time to reflect on the world in which I'd recently dwelt. I still do that.

As George R.R. Martin, the author of The Game of Thrones books, put it, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one." That's how reading has always felt to me. It means entering the imagination or intellect of another human for a time, hanging out, discovering a new perspective on the world. It's different than watching a TV show or a movie, which, for all their merits, are collaborations that require far less involvement from their audience. You can fall asleep and the movie still makes it to the end. Reading a book to the end requires effort.

One of the most important reading journeys of my life was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a dense, difficult work, translated into English from the original German, written by  a very smart man. I struggled to concentrate, I read and re-read sections, even entire chapters as I found myself losing focus. By the time I got to the middle chapters in which opposing philosophers -- Settembrini and Naphtha -- engage in long-winded and convoluted debates on topics I didn't really understand, let alone care about, I began to despair. In frustration, one morning, I started reading the book again from the beginning. In the afternoons, I would pick up where I had previously left off, so that I was, in effect, reading the book twice at once. Reading in this way, I was finally able to "get" the book: it's architectural, intellectual, and artistic beauty became clear to me, but it was only accessible through sharing the "ordeal" with the characters. There are those who insist that it's "no sin" to put down a book that bores you, and I have left some books unfinished, but I've also learned that many of my most profound reading experiences -- Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch -- involved some slogging and plodding alongside the characters in order to get to endings that, and I quote my father-in-law on this, "move my soul."

I'm currently on a reading tear, having finished four books, back-to-back, in which there was no slogging at all -- A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, Φ (Phi), Guilo Tononi, The Voice of the Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw (a play, but it reads like a novel). Each one of these books was, in its way, a page turner. I couldn't put them down, nor did I want them to end. 

The latest edition of The Atlantic includes a story entitle "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." The reporting is mostly anecdotal, but the university professors interviewed are raising concerns that many incoming students are incapable of reading entire books. The article blames technology and the pandemic, but mostly points the finger at the fact that fewer and fewer middle and high school educators are teaching "whole texts," opting instead for excerpts, short stories, and anthologies . . . Of course, they say they are doing this because kids today are too distracted.

Oh, I want to jump on this bandwagon so much, but when I look back on my own history as a reader, my school reading was a separate matter. Of course, I read The Lord of the Flies, A Catcher in the Rye, and The Old Man and the Sea, like most former public school students my age, and I didn't hate them, but it was the reading that I did outside of school that made me a reader. Reading what other people assigned to me was always a slog, and not the self-selected kind.

I want to castigate those teachers who don't expect their students to read entire books, but I also believe it's wrongheaded to think you can spark a love of reading whole books without simultaneously granting children the freedom to choose what they will read. That's what those Scholastic Books (and libraries) did for me. I also read The Hardy Boys and the entire Wizard of Oz series, books that today might be labelled "young adult," a category that at least one expert in The Atlantic article seems to dismiss.

What my Mom understood was that it's the reading that's important, even if it isn't all Jane Austen or Toni Morrison. Any book can become a slog when it's being "taught." I have no doubt that the Harry Potter books will soon find their way onto reading syllabi, if they haven't already, and that will effectively kill them as pleasure reading for an entire generation.

If we want kids to read books, we have to let them be in charge of the books they read. Our local library used to "challenge" kids to read 25 books during the summer. It didn't matter what kind of book and the results were self-reported. The reward? A coupon for a scoop of ice cream at a local parlor. I took great pride in finishing all those books . . . And while I enjoyed my ice cream, that wasn't what made me spend so much of my summer break curled up with books.

I have no doubt that smartphones and whatnot are distractions from reading, but there have always been easy distractions competing with books. I mean, we had the whole of outdoors and all the neighborhood children available to us, which, if we allowed the same free access to today's children, would, I'm certain, be a much bigger lure than any screen. But books actually brought us inside, even on our holidays, because our schools hadn't yet ruined books for us. Books weren't mere schoolroom resources, but rather doorways to freedom.

From the article: "Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader's own. 'A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics . . . Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges our sympathies.' . . . Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey: they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-call deep reading -- sustained immersion in a text -- stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not."

This is why it is important that we read books, entire books, but none of us like reading books we did not choose for ourselves. 

As preschool teachers, most of us read dozens of entire books nearly every day. Children bring books to us, asking us to read them aloud, and we do, and they don't let us get away with only reading an excerpt. They want, as they should, the whole thing. This is the way preschools prepare young children to become readers. Sadly, our elementary, middle-, and high schools have become so obsessed with teaching "academic skills" that they have come to approach books in the same way: not as world's to explore, but as just something else on which children will be judged. That's why the students in the article might be able to "decode words and sentences," but still don't know how to enter into a book, let alone finish it.

If we are serious about raising children who read whole books, we have to let them choose the books they will read, for pleasure, and without judgement.

I'm reminded of an exchange in Shaw's play. A character asserts, "My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear thinking about," to which another character replies, "That is why intellect is so unpopular."

Indeed, I fear that we have systematically removed pleasure from reading by turning it into an academic exercise. That is why it's so unpopular. 

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