I work closely with college students and, over the past several years I’ve overheard countless conversations where they’ve talked about how reading is not a priority, literature, especially classic literature is obsolete and out of touch with today’s society, or it’s simply not worth the time spent reading. What?! Until very recently, I hadn’t realized the gift my parents had given me teaching me to love reading. My parents had the constant battle to figure out where to put a new bookshelf, trying to keep up with the ever growing collection of books we had. I couldn’t help but fall into a book if I was bored, I was surrounded by them where ever I went, and it was beautiful. Books and reading became a huge part of my identity. There was the unspoken expectation that we would read, and that’s exactly what happened.
According to the National Center for Education, only 13% of the US is actually proficient in reading. The number of people actually reading literature at all - novels, plays, short stories, poems - is declining to only about 40% of the population EVER within a 12 month period. (That was four years ago, I can only assume that number has continued to decline!)
I truly believe that reading is one of the most important things we can do with our time. To start, reading allows us to experience things we would never have experienced otherwise. We can sail the ocean with Captain Ahab, float the Mississippi with Huck Finn, experience the horrors of slavery in the Civil War with Frederick Douglass, or know what it is to have a kindred friend like Anne and Diana. By reading, our potential for empathy increases, we can better understand people with vastly different backgrounds or beliefs. In an ever increasingly divided country, that need for empathy is as great as its ever been.
In my own home, reading brings my family together. Just a couple of weeks ago, we took our dogs to go swimming in the river near our house. In the whispy, aw-inspired voice that only a three year old can do, my sweet little girl saw some tall spindly flowers growing. “Look Mama, Miss Rumphius was here! There’s lupines!” Those simple, exhausted flowers definitely wouldn’t have made the same impression on my little girl if we hadn’t read Miss Rumphius together. We then spent the next few minutes inspecting the petals, comparing how tall they are, and just enjoying the beauty around us. Reading is an activity that unites and bonds us together.
The cutest thing is listening to my little girl whisper, “Mama, I’m going to go be impertinent…” right before she runs to go bounce on her daddy. That’s not a word I would have ever used with her, but she learned it from reading Beatrice Potter books. Through reading every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes, her language has grown in leaps and bounds. Most people in a day to day setting, speak at a 5th grade reading level, and I’m the first to admit that my grammar isn’t always the greatest. By reading, I can model to my girls how I would hope they will learn to speak and communicate, and so far, it’s working.
Do you remember plugging through Orwell’s 1984 in high school? Instead of saying something was great or better, it was plusgood. Instead of excellent, amazing, or benevolent, it was doubleplusgood. Reading is a way to expand our vocabulary, so we can then become better at communicating or even become better at experiencing ideas. I would argue that as language becomes less complex, thinking then follows suit. (If you want to learn more about this, Andrew Pudewa’s talk Nuturing Competent Communicators is brings up some interesting thoughts.)
Books completely fascinate me. I hope to share with you through this blog here why books are some of my most treasured possessions, a little about their history, and why these “archaic” pieces of literature still impact us today, as well as a little bit of a glimpse into my world of bookbinding. (If you want to talk about archaic, I’m actively using tools made in the 19th century, and they’re amazing!)
