When my mother was in the first grade, members of the Dallas Board of Education visited her classroom. Since she was the best reader in class, the teacher called on my mother to read to the visitors. After she read with as much expression as a six-year-old can muster, the board members praised her profusely, so much so that she responded, “I can read it without the book, too.”
Indeed, she could because books brought her so much pleasure that for the rest of her life, she frequently memorized favorite passages just from the frequent rereading of them. As an adult, she also enjoyed traveling to the many places around the world that she had read about. However, I don’t think that ship or plane ever took her as far as her imagination, stimulated by the books she read, did.
As school resumes, we all pay verbal homage to the importance of being able to read. We tell our children how important it is for them to learn to read well. But, do we show them? Do we personally read more than we watch television or go to the movies? Do we rejoice in the joy that reading brings us? Or, are we too busy with the daily routine of life? I truly believe education can work wonders, but parents, by example, are teachers, too. As with so many skills, we learn to read well by reading often.
In the foreword to The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, daughter Caroline Kennedy writes, “Now that I have my own children, I understand in a new way that if you love something, your children will want to love it too.”
In the last few years, I found that even my best students were not the readers of previous generations. When I asked for them to write about a favorite book, inevitably most would write about a children’s book, then confess that they didn’t read much beyond class assignments anymore. At that point, I would launch into one of my favorite soapbox messages about how they had cheated themselves by not reading more. As my mother discovered years ago, written words on a page allowed her to travel to far away places in her imagination. Until the day she died, she found her own imagination provided great company.
Whenever we settle for letting illustrators, filmmakers, television producers or game makers determine what fictional characters look like for us, we diminish our own ability to visualize, to create, to dream, to imagine. Reading is a two-way street along which the reader and the author travel together. While an author attempts to show what he sees, the reader, in turn, must draw on his own imagination to create a similar picture in his mind.
While we may call people who read often bookworms as if they can actually wiggle their way into the pages, we call those who watch endless hours of television couch potatoes, people with lots of eyes, but no ability to create visions on their own. They let others do the thinking for them. And people who let others think for them all the time either become very wishy washy as they fluctuate from one fad to another or so rigid in their thinking that they cannot entertain the notion that true innovation makes life better.
Likewise over the years, I have discovered that the young people who read regularly write with truer voice and a deeper insight than the television junkies. From years of reading many different authors, good readers have honed their own ability to think. They do not imitate.
Because reading also allows a person to move at his own pace, he has the time to reread, mull over, memorize as my mother did, agree or disagree with the author. While a television show or movie can truly be entertaining and even on occasion, informational, we do not develop retrospective skills from viewing flashing images in front of our eyes. If we’re not careful, we, like the screen itself, tend to see all of life merely on the surface.
Since I used the term “classic” so often about books we studied in class, students asked me to define the difference between a good book and a classic. For me, the distinction is obvious. A good book is any book any individual really enjoys. We have so much to choose from on the shelf because we all don’t enjoy reading the same kinds of books. Personally, I don’t like to read mystery nor romance, but my preference in genre does not define any book as good or bad for someone else.
However, most of the books we study in high school have been deemed “classic” because first of all, their themes remain universal across time and space. Secondly, classics have survived the fickle public. We study these books to determine the reasons why people reread them and why generation after generation find meaning in them. Schools do not declare a book a classic; readers, over time, do. Calling the classics good, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Tis the good reader that makes a good book.” Mark Twain added, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
Last year, one of my students asked me if I thought Tuesdays with Morrie, a book he had just read on his own, would ever become a classic. I told him that this book about learning how to live by learning how to die might well be labeled a classic one day. Ever since its first printing several years ago, it has had staying power on the best seller lists. I do know that some colleges have already added this book to their reading lists.
We Americans are a nation of story tellers. Almost like a mnemonic devise, we want our important messages wrapped in a tale with a beginning, middle and end. From the legends handed down from one generation to the next to the yarns grandparents spin, from the anecdotes politicians expound to the pointed jokes comedians tell to the incidents preachers share to inspire, we remember the story and its lesson even when we forget the exposition. Likewise, learning to read well develops so many more skills than a mere understanding of plot. It teaches us how to think for ourselves.
2002
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