Serious question: Does anyone read any more? And no, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram memes, even this editorial, don’t count.
All of the above should be considered grazeable snacks to be consumed on the run, stuck in traffic…during a Zoom meeting or while watching Netflix which actually has a genre known as ambient tv that requires only passing attention for Homo Distractus to enjoy.
What we are talking about might be called “reading reading”. Sitting down in a quiet room in a comfortable chair, perhaps with a cup of tea and a good book. It seems almost old fashioned like doing embroidery or grating your own coconut for last night’s cookup.
No one can dispute that reading as a pursuit has been in decline for decades and continues to be. One survey indicated that between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours(New Yorker).
We have no clue locally how many minutes the average Guyanese reads but it seems pretty clear that the reading of books among all age levels as a pastime is now at a niche level, something rather odd and alas considered elitist.
It’s a great pity. Aside from the political ramifications of a poorly informed electorate who can read functionally but lack comprehension and thus can only parrot received opinions, those who don’t read any more are themselves missing out on a richer life in three ways: Education, Entertainment and Escape.
While we may consider reading the newspaper as reading, can we truly understand the complexity of today’s Haitian politics without reading CLR James’ “Black Jacobins”; Covid-19 without reading “The Great Influenza” by John Barry on the 1918 to 1920 pandemic and how it ended as the virus mutated to a less deadly variant after having killed an estimated 50 million.
Closer to home, how much more deeply we can appreciate the arguments in our case before the International Court of Justice having read Cedric Joseph’s forensic and fascinating “Anglo-American Diplomacy And The Reopening Of The Guyana-Venezuela Boundary Controversy, 1961-1966”. Only books can deliver the deep knowledge to understand our present world and make informed choices.
To open a book is like diving into a swimming pool, to become instantly submerged in and surrounded by ideas, images and characters. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina hurling herself off the platform, Tolkein’s Dragon, Lord Smaug sitting on his pile of gold, Naipaul’s Salim at his Bend in the River and Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia pontificating from his South London living room. How drab the real world is compared to the Worlds of Literature where you can fly through space and time.
For entertainment there may be easier media these days but as children it was equally exciting to devour books like mice in the night by torch light. Hardy Boys, Stephen King, Mills and Boon….Barbara Cartland? Really? And for the next generation it was the blockbuster Harry Potter. One can recall children lining up outside Austin’s early morning for the release of the final book. Sadly, school in many cases does an excellent job of extinguishing that early carefree love for reading, and if someone is lucky enough to go to university, reading has by then become a dreaded chore like laundry. Students of all ages should be given free time to read widely as part of cultivating good habits and just as importantly to help them become better writers.
For many childhoods, books also offered an escape from households in turmoil, of fighting parents or worse. And it is perhaps this escape that might be as valuable to us even as adults. The way the cares of the world fall away as we simply begin to read. Gone are the maddening bills, the spouse, the kids, that worrying rattle in your car. Instead having resumed our book we are laughing or weeping with our characters like old friends.
There’s no need to get snobbish about what you read or even how you read it. Fiction, non-fiction, sci fi, romance, horror, history, biography in book form or on a kindle or a tablet, even an audiobook while driving will offer the same effect.
And even if you have been out of the reading habit it is not daunting to restart. Maybe ease into it like wading in the shallow end. Half an hour per day in an armchair in a quiet room away from the infernal cellphone. Or just ration oneself to ten pages, preferably the same time each day. Over a few weeks build up your appetite 20, 30, 50 pages until who knows you might evolve into a bookworm/hermit devouring words and ignoring all other pleasures to escape to that quiet place and page through which our minds burrow out. And there will be moments when it becomes so engrossing that to stop and then re-enter the real world is as startling as stumbling out of a cinema onto a sunlit crowded street.
Reading helps us understand our world, our relationships and ourselves. As the recently departed Joan Didion, a shrewd interpreter of America wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea…We look for the sermon in the suicide.”
In 2022 let’s open a book and dive in!
