Reading Magic Award – Parenting Magazine 2000; Nelson
I t's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A proclamation of members' interests, of a sort. And so, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'yard going to tell you that libraries are of import. I'thousand going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is i of the most important things one can do. I'chiliad going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'yard an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For nearly 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my involvement for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to be and aid foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.
Then I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British denizen.
And I'm here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give anybody an equal take chances in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the human activity of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it'south that change, and that act of reading that I'one thousand here to talk well-nigh tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it'south practiced for.
I was in one case in New York, and I listened to a talk virtually the edifice of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to programme its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to exist, 15 years from now? And they constitute they could predict information technology very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-yr-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It'due south not one to one: you lot can't say that a literate social club has no criminality. But in that location are very existent correlations.
And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very elementary. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens adjacent, to want to turn the folio, the need to go along going, fifty-fifty if information technology's difficult, considering someone's in problem and you have to know how it'southward all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to larn new words, to think new thoughts, to continue going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. One time yous acquire that, y'all're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. At that place were noises made briefly, a few years agone, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to brand sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more than important than they e'er were: we navigate the earth with words, and as the world slips onto the web, nosotros need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot sympathise each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.
The simplest style to make sure that nosotros enhance literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that ways, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them admission to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't think in that location is such a thing as a bad volume for children. Every now and over again it becomes fashionable amidst some adults to bespeak at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should exist stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
Information technology's tosh. It's snobbery and information technology'southward foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, considering every child is different. They can observe the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out thought isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the start time the child has encountered information technology. Practise not discourage children from reading considering you lot experience they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do non like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a kid'due south love of reading: terminate them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that y'all like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll air current upwards with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they savor reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Too, exercise non do what this writer did when his 11-year-old girl was into RL Stine, which is to go and go a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you lot'll love this! Holly read nothing merely safe stories of settlers on prairies for the balance of her teenage years, and withal glares at me when Stephen Rex's proper name is mentioned.)
And the 2nd matter fiction does is to build empathy. When y'all watch Television or come across a picture, y'all are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and yous, and you lone, using your imagination, create a globe and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You lot learn that everyone else out there is a me, every bit well. You're being someone else, and when yous return to your ain globe, you're going to be slightly inverse.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing u.s. to part as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as yous read vitally of import for making your style in the world. And information technology's this:
The world doesn't take to be similar this. Things tin can be dissimilar.
I was in China in 2007, at the first political party-approved scientific discipline fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one bespeak I took a superlative official bated and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had inverse?
It's unproblematic, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did non invent. They did not imagine. And then they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the futurity most themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you a different world. It tin take y'all somewhere you've never been. One time you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you tin can never be entirely content with the world that you grew upwardly in. Discontent is a good matter: discontented people tin modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words almost escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it'south a bad affair. Equally if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the earth the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you accept information technology? And escapist fiction is but that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a identify to go where you are in command, are with people you desire to be with(and books are real places, make no error almost that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can besides give you knowledge about the globe and your predicament, give yous weapons, give yous armour: real things you lot can take back into your prison house. Skills and noesis and tools you can use to escape for existent.
As JRR Tolkien reminded u.s.a., the merely people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to brand certain in that location are no books of any kind around. And to requite them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing upwards. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drib me off in the library on their mode to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a pocket-size, unaccompanied boy heading dorsum into the children'due south library every morning and working his style through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were practiced librarians. They liked books and they liked the books existence read. They taught me how to lodge books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to similar that there was this wide-eyed footling boy who loved to read, and would talk to me almost the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me every bit another reader – zero less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to existence treated with respect as an eight-year-old.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, liberty of ideas, freedom of communication. They are virtually education (which is non a process that finishes the solar day we leave school or university), about entertainment, well-nigh making safety spaces, and almost access to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which near, simply not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I remember it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right data has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to discover things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a repast and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.
In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to ane driven by an data glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every 2 days now the human being race creates every bit much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's near 5 exobytes of information a solar day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, non finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, simply finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. Nosotros are going to need help navigating that information to find the affair we actually need.
Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are but the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide y'all freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than e'er before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are as well, for instance, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have cyberspace connections, tin can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the mode you notice out about jobs, use for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can assist these people navigate that world.
I exercise not believe that all books will or should drift onto screens: as Douglas Adams in one case pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned upward, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are onetime: at that place were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than annihilation else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, experience good in your hand: they are skilful at existence books, and at that place will always be a place for them. They vest in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can become to become access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It'southward a identify of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future volition be like is something we should be imagining now.
Literacy is more of import than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a globe of written information. Nosotros need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, empathize nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries really are the gates to the future. So information technology is unfortunate that, round the world, we find local regime seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an like shooting fish in a barrel way to relieve money, without realising that they are stealing from the futurity to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should exist open.
According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Evolution, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has college proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and blazon of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put it another manner, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than nosotros are. They are less able to navigate the globe, to empathise it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will exist less able to alter the earth in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And equally a country, England will autumn behind other developed nations because it volition lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the way that nosotros communicate with the expressionless. The style that we acquire lessons from those who are no longer with united states, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made noesis incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. At that place are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were start told.
I recall we accept responsibilities to the time to come. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will get, to the world they will discover themselves inhabiting. All of usa – as readers, every bit writers, as citizens – have obligations. I idea I'd endeavour and spell out some of these obligations hither.
I believe nosotros have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others encounter us reading, and then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We testify others that reading is a good thing.
We take an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you practice not value libraries and then you do not value data or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are dissentious the time to come.
We take an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make information technology interesting, and not to stop reading to them but because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time every bit bonding time, equally fourth dimension when no phones are existence checked, when the distractions of the globe are put aside.
We accept an obligation to employ the linguistic communication. To push ourselves: to observe out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what nosotros hateful. We must not to attempt to freeze linguistic communication, or to pretend information technology is a expressionless thing that must be revered, merely we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and specially writers for children, merely all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it'due south the obligation to write true things, particularly important when we are creating tales of people who practise not be in places that never were – to empathise that truth is not in what happens just what it tells the states near who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to diameter our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and requite them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we take gleaned from our brusque stay on this green globe, we take an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, non to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like developed birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, always, nether any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.
Nosotros accept an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess information technology upwardly and write dull books that plough children abroad from reading and from books, we 've lessened our ain future and macerated theirs.
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. Nosotros take an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals alter their world over and over, individuals make the hereafter, and they do information technology past imagining that things can exist different.
Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and wait around the room that you are in. I'thousand going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Information technology's this: that everything yous can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided information technology was easier to sit down on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a mode that I could talk to yous in London right at present without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this urban center, exist considering, over and over and over, people imagined things.
We accept an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found information technology, not to empty the oceans, not to go out our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean upward after ourselves, and non leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed upwards, shortchanged, and crippled.
Nosotros accept an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever political party who exercise not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do non want to human action to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a thing of party politics. This is a affair of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked one time how we could brand our children intelligent. His answer was both uncomplicated and wise. "If y'all want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you desire them to be more than intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I promise we can give our children a earth in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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