School opened my appetite for reading.
One fine day, some teachers gathered eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds and bussed us to the Public Library, then in Coleridge Street.
I am not sure if we were more excited about getting to see some part of Bridgetown or about the prospect of going virtually hog-wild among more books than we could imagine.
But since that day my love affair with books has been like MP Rawle Eastmond’s publicly indicated engagement of certain vices – very enjoyable and costly.
I have immersed myself with the printed word, books especially – many bookshelves full, computer hard drives an ally, PDA a consort, Kindle an accomplice, tablet almost a bosom buddy.
However, I am, from all indications, one of a dying breed.
Not long ago a friend of mine said to me: “If you want to hide something from certain people, put it between the pages of a book.”
And he was talking about Barbadians – citizens of this place that used to boast of having 98 per cent literacy but is now the home of many aliterates – people who can read but have a strong unwillingness to do so.
The same Mr Eastmond, recently referring to some who had managed to acquire university degrees, declared that their only reading after that was of signs.
At this point someone will try to remind me that people are making a lot of use of the Internet.
The best response to that, I think, would be to quote from an editorial in the SATURDAY SUN on September 10 last year (sometimes the writer uncannily captures my thinking): “. . . it is hard to equate this popular instant coffee, flitting flirtation with the printed word with the intense involvement with continuous prose that we have long associated with the act of reading.
“For some time we have been acquainted with sound bites. Most people’s engagement of the Internet is a taking of print bites (perhaps more properly ‘print bytes’).”
Hard to gainsay that! Not much real reading going on these days.
So imagine my shock when, during yesterday morning’s walk, I encountered a mid-twentiesish man reading.
I must tell you that I spotted the device first. And then my eyes checked for the use of his hands. His right arm was propping his chin and his left hand was simply holding the device (so he wasn’t texting, and he wasn’t playing a game), as head down, seemingly unaware of the rest of the world around him, he was reading from a Kindle.
I don’t know what he was reading, but it was hardly something from a trashy magazine. Believe it or not, an unattributed piece called 10 Minutes To Spare in Sunday’s EASY magazine, giving advice about how we could use our supposedly very limited time these days, suggested that since we’re not going to be able to get through a chapter in a novel, “why not flip through a trashy magazine? . . . It’ll be a nice escape”.
I don’t second that motion, even for time-pressed individuals. Whatever you do, read some good fiction.
If your life is so squeezed, get your hands instead on a genre of short story which some call sudden fiction and others flash fiction. These lightning jolts of close-up reality come in at anything from 100 words to about 750 words.
Some interesting findings are emerging about reading fiction. Early last year Keith Oakley put out an absorbing book called Such Stuff As Dreams: The Psychology Of Fiction that explores this area and he also has an article in December’s American Scientific Mind entitled In The Minds Of Others. Other theorists/researchers like Lisa Zunshine (Why We Read Fiction) and Suzanne Keen (Empathy And The Novel) explore benefits like “theory of mind” – the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from your own – and empathy.
If you have been watching this space, you know that I am big on things like that. Interestingly, preliminary research is showing that these benefits come from reading fiction in particular, not watching it.
At this point we might start to sing the praises of the teaching of literature, but believe it or not the traditional approach to teaching literature is one of the culprits in the continuing saga of diminished reading. Kelly Gallagher coined the expression “readicide” and wrote the book Readicide, detailing both how reading is declining in the United States and how the school system is complicit in its abandonment.
But, wherever you are, you better read some good fiction – no lie!