Reading is FUNdamental. Or something. Whatevs.

[deborah]

I find that, perhaps because of my profession or because my home has enough books to provide structural support, people tend to assume that I will agree with the sentiment "But at least they are reading!" For the record, I don't. I don't see any intrinsic value in reading, per se. I know plenty of people who read and gain nothing from it. I know plenty of people who spend substantially more time online or watching television and gain as much from those tasks as others do from reading, or more.

Here's what I do see value in:

• The mechanics of reading: I'll readily admit that the mechanics of being able to read, basic literacy in the reader's home's language, is exceptionally valuable, but its value can be overstated. Here's a hint: if you are looking for intellectual, thoughtful participants in society, literature, and the media who don't have access to the basic mechanics of looking at letters and deciphering them, you need look no further than your nearest friend who is blind or visually impaired (I know, I'm ignoring braille). I won't deny that it's much easier to get by if you can decipher letters on the page/screen, but it's patently not necessary. I say this as a reminder to myself as much as anyone. Why did I have no problem with a student using audio books when the student had a registered disability, and yet I had a gut negative reaction when a student with no registered disability mentioned to me that she was listening to the assigned reading on her iPod? If I think that the reading experience for the student with the disability was as valid and as rich when she used the audio books, why should I think that experience would be any the less for the able-bodied student? This is not to say that I think that people who have the ability to learn the mechanics needn't do so; of course I think they ought to. But we need to have more respect for other forms of consuming texts, such as audio.


• Literacy in a second language, spoken and preferably written: Like many Anglophones, I actually don't have this one. I wish English-speaking countries had more respect for the importance of bilingualism. I'm not going to say that bilingualism automatically makes people less chauvinistic. But still, having more than one language increases your capacity for being able to understand other cultural perspectives.


• The ability to understand, critically engage with, and discuss fiction and nonfiction texts: Where by "texts" I mean books, newspapers, television shows, commercials, movies, and Internet materials. All of these types of texts participate in the construction of our society.


• The ability to enjoy nonfiction and fiction texts: I believe that the ability to enjoy fiction enriches a reader's ability to posit hypotheticals. I believe that the ability to enjoy nonfiction increases a reader's willingness to learn about the world. Note that I am not privileging any type of text; I don't see more intrinsic value to enjoying John McPhee's The Control of Nature, an episode of Discover, or a stellar piece of investigative journalism.


• The ability to distinguish among the different genre characteristics of the media consumed : Note that I am not saying that readers need to prefer high quality to trash, just that they need to be able to distinguish between them. The reasons for this are more obvious with nonfiction. If a reader can't distinguish between nuanced nonfiction and tabloid journalism, she'll be easily deceived. This doesn't mean it's not okay to enjoy tabloid journalism (or junky television, or pulp novels). But a reader who can distinguish what the characteristics are of the media she's consuming will be better able to critically engage.

The upshot of all of this is that someone who cares passionately about, say, So You Think You Can Dance, The Babysitters Club, Slashdot, Buffy, and The New York Post, thinks about them all critically, and discusses them with other people who think about them critically, is likely to be a better thinker and more informed participant in society than somebody who sits at home statically consuming the latest Booker prize winner without any further thought or discussion.

Comments

[darkemeralds]

I happened upon this post in Latest Things just now and wanted to thank you for it. I've never articulated this stance consciously, but you've nailed something I've often thought about. It really cropped up in the Harry Potter volume 3 days, when suddenly it was amazingly awesome that "kids are reading a thick book with no illustrations."

Yes, it's awesome--there is nothing to compare to the experience of absorption in reading, especially an engaging story, and I'm glad Rowling's books have helped keep the experience alive--but it's not in and of itself some great virtue.

I have a degree in literature (in another language), and I no longer consider myself much of a reader at all in the traditional sense. I hardly ever crack a book, and it surprises the hell out of people who suppose that someone who talks and thinks like I do isn't immersed in "reading books" all the time. I'm online a lot, I listen to books (neither eyesight nor attention span being what they once were), I read a lot of non-book material, and I'm literate. But you'd never know it from my non-existent List of Books I Read in 2009.

[deborah]

I think during the Harry Potter craze is where I really started to articulate these thoughts. Not that I had any problem with kids reading Harry Potter, but in many kids it didn't turn into any major life adjustments for the better or the worse. My nephews are not readers, but they read the entire Harry Potter series because that's what kids did. Reading it didn't turn them into readers; they read it for the same reason that many adults watch Lost or American Idol.

And there's nothing wrong with that! I'm glad they enjoyed reading those books, and I'm glad they had the experience of having stories they encountered be something to discuss with their friends. Whether it's Harry Potter or Lost, that's a valuable experience.

And WORD on not being a traditional reader. Was it the National Council of Teachers of English a couple of years ago who did that survey on youth reading where they discounted anything read on the Internet as "reading"? Or anything assigned.

[darkemeralds]

They discounted assigned reading?

Wow. That says a great deal, doesn't it?

[lamentables]

So much WORD!

My parents rarely read for pleasure yet, as a child, there was nothing I could do that pleased them so much as reading a book. This was not a hardship for me. I've never been able to fathom, though, why it meant so much to them for their children to enjoy reading when they don't do it themselves.

[deborah]

right! It's like we've been indoctrinated that the all holy reading is something that will make you a smarter, better, platonic ideal of a person.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a LIBRARIAN. I got in trouble in elementary school for reading too much. I have enough books in the room I'm currently sitting in that I could build a small hut to protect myself from the elements. I love books madly.

But I don't think any of that makes me a better, smarter, more platonic ideal of a person. There are specific *facets* of the way I read that I think have made me smarter. Like I said, I think learning to be a critical reader is vitally important, but a lot of my learning to be a critical reader has come from television or the Internet. I do think science fiction can help make people more thoughtful about the future -- but it depends on what science fiction they read.

[steepholm]

Why did I have no problem with a student using audio books when the student had a registered disability, and yet I had a gut negative reaction when a student with no registered disability mentioned to me that she was listening to the assigned reading on her iPod?

Snap! And thanks for drawing my attention to the inconsistency.

[deborah]

I felt so clueless when I realised. I was about to be all, "S, that's not reading!" and then I recalled that the student with a disability was doing the exact same thing, and I had no problems whatsoever with expecting that to be a valid way to participate with the text.

[ayelle]

Have you read my post about this? http://writinghood.livejournal.com/1605.html

I made the mistake of mentioning to a Simmons ChLit professor that I was doing some of the reading for her class via audiobook, and was a bit shocked by her strong negative reaction. And I *did* have a registered disability -- and that disability was actually the reason I was listening to audiobooks. Because my depression was so bad it affected my ability to concentrate in some ways, and audiobooks helped. (But of course that was the wrong kind of disability to explain why I would need to be listening to audiobooks. I wasn't visually impaired, nor did I even have some kind of easily-understood cognitive impairment like dyslexia. I didn't have much trouble reading, actually -- I had trouble doing anything OTHER than reading or listening, and badly needed to be doing one or the other 100% of the time in order to remain sane. I couldn't be alone in my head at any time, was the problem, or I'd break down crying...)

But everything about my experience of disability at Simmons ended up being very, very negative, in the end. (Well, except for meeting Todd because of the disability workshop I did when I worked as a tutor at the incredibly awesome Academic Services Department, and the fact that I learned that my depression actually *was* a considered a disability, and that's actually where my mind opened up and I started learning to think in brand new ways about disability AT ALL. That was good. But it's also kind of painful to learn about the discrimination all around you that you used to not know was there and blame on yourself... ANYWAY.)

[oursin]

statically consuming the latest Booker prize winner without any further thought or discussion.

Because it is the thing to do and gives them cultural brownie points. Sigh.
People who read without love and passion - meh: I really hate that type of criticism which goes around marking writers out of ten on some scale, done by people who don't seem to have ever read for pleasure, or have given it up as insufficiently serious and academic.

[deborah]

And then I meet people who don't read for pleasure because they think the only kind of books they are allowed to read after the serious academic. I've met people who stopped reading because they only enjoyed nonfiction, and they knew that wasn't real reading, so they just stopped. It made me want to WEEP.

[lady_schrapnell]

The upshot of all of this is that someone who cares passionately about, say, So You Think You Can Dance, The Babysitters Club, Slashdot, Buffy, and The New York Post, thinks about them all critically, and discusses them with other people who think about them critically, is likely to be a better thinker and more informed participant in society than somebody who sits at home statically consuming the latest Booker prize winner without any further thought or discussion.

Also probably true with respect to various aspects of internet reading too - Cara recently read tons about the Amanda Palmer "Evelyn Evelyn" fiasco on OH NO THEY DIDN'T and then on Jezebel (and all interviews etc with Amanda Palmer and everything), and said the comments on the straight-up celebrity gossip site were by far the most intelligent. And then she sent a gazillion links to Bec -- in the room next door -- and they rehashed it all and were in total agreement.

I'm not sure I'm with you 100% on the audiobook listening and the two students though. While it's entirely possible to study a text critically by listening to a read version, as is proved by the disabled student's having made it to your course, it's not necessarily a set of skills every student will have gained. I've only been listening to audiobooks regularly for a couple of years now and I wouldn't dream of using an audiobook as my only source for critical reading (for review or study). Not that I'm going to stand in for every sighted student, of course. Still, I think your initial response wasn't as inconsistent as you're considering it to be. While it is reading in either case, it may very well not allow the type of critical reading necessary for studying a text for the sighted student. (I read for a blind woman studying clinical nutrition just after I'd left the graduate clinical programme, and I was astonished at how different - and much more complex - her study process was from mine or that of anyone else I knew.)

[ayelle]

While I agree that listening to audiobooks critically is a skill set that has to be learned, so is reading critically on the page. You can skim a book; you can "read" a book and yet not think critically about it, which is part of what this post points out, of course. I learned to listen as critically as I had learned to read critically by training myself, and it took hard work. (I had a very, VERY strong motivation to learn that skill!)

I wish that critical listening were a more valued skill, educationally speaking, and were taught (especially as podcasts take off and people get more and more news through sound clips and such...).

What makes me angry is when people (and these are usually readers rather than listeners by preference) ASSUME that listeners aren't listening critically, assume that listening isn't, and can't be, a critical skill too. They seem to base this assumption on their own experience and on the fact that they either can't or have chosen not train themselves to listen critically themselves. I think that's OKAY. I very strongly agree with this post that it's problematic how we valorize skill sets, and I don't think it's bad that lots of people don't like to listen to audiobooks. That's fine! But it does make me angry how dismissive people can be of the people who DO.

Admittedly: I think that reading critically and listening critically, even by people who've trained themselves to do it carefully, are still not IDENTICAL skill sets. I do both, and I don't find them to be identical experiences. (After all, some studies have shown that even reading on the page and reading online are not identical experiences, particularly for non-native speakers of the language! Though for native/advanced speakers, the differences become vanishingly less important.) But I also think they're closer than people realize; and I think they're both valuable.

[deborah]

this is from months ago, but I was just thinking about what you said here because I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks (because of my own disability).

It's interesting -- I would feel exceedingly leery of teaching the books without having the printed texts to turn to, because that's how I've learned to read. And yet listening, because it's forcing me not to skim, is revealing things about the texts to me which I'd never thought before. I'm almost reaching the point where I feel like audiobook + print gives me a richer critical reading than either of them standing alone.