Quote Read a Book for the First Time Again
I t'south of import for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might exist biased. A annunciation of members' interests, of a sort. And then, I am going to exist talking to y'all about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are of import. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things i can do. I'thousand 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'chiliad an author, frequently an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For nigh 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 interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and aid foster a honey of reading and places in which reading can occur.
So I'thousand biased as a author. Simply I am much, much more biased every bit a reader. And I am fifty-fifty more than biased as a British citizen.
And I'm hither giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to requite everyone an equal gamble in life past helping people get confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it's that alter, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it's skillful for.
I was one time in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, xv years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not one to ane: you tin't say that a literate society has no misdeed. But in that location are very real correlations.
And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come up from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has 2 uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens adjacent, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in problem and you have to know how information technology's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you lot to learn new words, to recall new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you lot learn that, you lot're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. In that location were noises made briefly, a few years ago, 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, just those days are gone: words are more than important than they ever were: nosotros navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what nosotros are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs merely get so far.
The simplest way to brand certain that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they relish, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't call up there is such a thing as a bad volume for children. Every now and again information technology becomes stylish among some adults to point 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 accept been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and desire to read and seek out, because every child is unlike. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the start fourth dimension the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because yous experience they are reading the incorrect thing. Fiction yous do non like is a route to other books yous may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
Well-meaning adults tin can easily destroy a child'due south love of reading: terminate them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-ho-hum books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they bask reading will motility them up, rung past rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to get and get a copy of Stephen King'southward Carrie, saying if you lot liked those you lot'll beloved this! Holly read nil but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the residuum of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's proper noun is mentioned.)
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you lookout man Tv set or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a scattering of punctuation marks, and you lot, and you lot alone, using your imagination, create a earth and people it and wait out through other eyes. You get to experience things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Yous're beingness someone else, and when y'all return to your ain world, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for assuasive us to part equally more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're likewise finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it'south this:
The globe doesn't have to be similar this. Things can exist dissimilar.
I was in China in 2007, at the commencement party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at i point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It's simple, 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 not invent. They did not imagine. Then they sent a delegation to the U.s., to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show y'all a different world. It can have yous somewhere yous've never been. One time you've visited other worlds, similar those who ate fairy fruit, y'all can never exist entirely content with the earth that you grew upwardly in. Discontent is a good affair: discontented people tin can modify and better their worlds, leave them ameliorate, get out them different.
And while nosotros're on the bailiwick, I'd similar to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about every bit if it's a bad affair. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the just fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If yous 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 yous take information technology? And escapist fiction is only that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight exterior, gives you a place to go where yous are in control, are with people you desire to exist with(and books are real places, brand no mistake near that); and more chiefly, during your escape, books tin can also give you knowledge about the earth and your predicament, give yous weapons, give you armour: existent things y'all tin can accept dorsum into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another manner to destroy a child'due south love of reading, of course, is to make sure at that place are no books of whatever kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing upward. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not heed a small, unaccompanied male child heading back into the children's library every morning time and working his fashion 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'south' library I began on the developed books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They but seemed to like that there was this broad-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 equally some other reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to existence treated with respect as an eight-yr-old.
But libraries are most freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about pedagogy (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or academy), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and almost admission 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 almost, but not all, books in impress exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I recall it has to do with nature of data. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we take lived in a time of data scarcity, and having the needed data was always important, and ever worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were ever good for a meal and company. Data was a valuable matter, and those who had it or could obtain information technology could charge for that service.
In the concluding few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. Co-ordinate to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days at present the human race creates every bit much data every bit we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's about 5 exobytes of data a twenty-four hour period, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, non finding that deficient plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific found growing in a jungle. Nosotros are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing nosotros actually need.
Libraries are places that people become to for information. Books are merely the tip of the information iceberg: they are at that place, and libraries tin can provide y'all freely and legally with books. More than children are borrowing books from libraries than ever earlier – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. Just libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the style you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or use for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians tin assist these people navigate that world.
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: every bit Douglas Adams in one case pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned upwardly, a concrete volume is like a shark. Sharks are old: in that location were sharks in the sea before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at existence sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bathroom-resistant, solar-operated, experience good in your hand: they are good at existence books, and there will always exist a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can get to become access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of data and gives every citizen equal admission to information technology. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. Information technology's a identify of safety, a haven from the world. It'south a place with librarians in information technology. What the libraries of the future will be like is something nosotros should be imagining at present.
Literacy is more than of import than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written data. We need to read and write, we demand 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. And then it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local regime seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy fashion to save coin, without realising that they are stealing from the time to come to pay for today. They are endmost the gates that should exist open up.
According to a contempo study by the System for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "but country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest grouping, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and blazon of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than nosotros are. They are less able to navigate the earth, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, exist less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the style that we communicate with the dead. The way that we acquire lessons from those who are no longer with usa, that humanity has congenital on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. At that place are tales that are older than about countries, tales that accept long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were outset told.
I remember we accept responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will get, to the earth they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, every bit citizens – accept obligations. I idea I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see u.s.a. reading, then we acquire, we do our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.
We take an obligation to support libraries. To apply libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protestation the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries and so you lot do non value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the by and you are dissentious the futurity.
We have 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 practise the voices, to make it interesting, and not to end reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Employ reading-aloud time every bit bonding time, as fourth dimension when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
Nosotros have an obligation to employ the language. To push button ourselves: to detect out what words hateful and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to try to freeze language, or to pretend it is a expressionless thing that must be revered, but we should utilize information technology every bit a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and particularly writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it'southward the obligation to write truthful things, peculiarly important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to sympathize that truth is non in what happens but what it tells usa about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, just to make them need to turn the pages. 1 of the best cures for a reluctant reader, later all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while nosotros must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on any wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this dark-green world, we have an obligation non to preach, not to lecture, non to force predigested morals and messages downwards our readers' throats like developed birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, nether whatever circumstances, to write anything for children that nosotros would not want to read ourselves.
We take an obligation to empathize and to acknowledge that as writers for children nosotros are doing important work, because if we mess it upwardly and write dull books that turn children abroad from reading and from books, we 've lessened our ain future and macerated theirs.
Nosotros all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is piece of cake to pretend that nobody can change annihilation, that nosotros are in a earth in which social club is huge and the individual is less than cypher: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals modify their world over and over, individuals brand the future, and they do it by imagining that things tin be different.
Look around you: I hateful it. Interruption, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to signal out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided information technology was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to yous in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist considering, over and over and over, people imagined things.
We have an obligation to make things cute. Non to leave the earth uglier than we establish information technology, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to make clean up after ourselves, and non leave our children with a earth we've shortsightedly messed upwardly, shortchanged, and bedridden.
We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of any party who practise not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who practise not want to human action to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked once how we could brand our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to exist intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope nosotros tin give our children a world in which they will read, and exist read to, and imagine, and empathize.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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