When we visited his house I would sleep in a narrow room with large windows, lined with about one and a half thousand books. These were mostly academic tomes of history, philosophy and poetry, and whilst I’m sure their contents had some value, there’s no way that any text could live up to the incredible, mysterious beauty of the spines.
While the strange titles, the colours and textures, the age and above all the smell, could claim to be alluring, these are all as nothing compared to the real reason that these books were so beautiful.
They were completely impenetrable.
No child could read any of those books; they had far too many pages filled with words with far too many letters.
It would take a grown-up to be able to read books like that. A real man could crack open one of those books and receive all their mysterious secrets, but a boy would see only letters and words.
My father is not an academic, although many of his siblings are. I think he found that behind the veil of scholarship there was a mistrust of the real world, so instead he became a great reader of novels.
I once watched in bewilderment as he read ‘The Two Towers’ in a single day. As far as I was concerned, this was the greatest feat of mental strength ever displayed by mortal man.
So for me, and many fortunate others, reading was not just a simple exchange of effort for entertainment, it was also a rite of passage. Even before I could conceivably gain any understanding from the words I deciphered, the actual challenge of reading was reason enough to pursue it.
This made it easy, and I’ve been benefiting from that my entire life.
My mother taught me my letters when I was four. I remember the alphabet being listed at the back of one of those books with the golden spines. She would point to a letter and I would say what it was called. One time she pointed to the letter R, and as I couldn’t remember the name I exclaimed ‘Argh’ in frustration, which turned out to be the answer. I found this to be such an incredible coincidence that the entire scene was locked into my memory forever, and is now one of the few things I can actually recall from that age.
It’s funny how we only recall the really unusual things that happened to us as children, but what we’re most interested in remembering is the everyday things.
So I learnt to read, and took it as a great point of pride. I probably inched my way through ‘The Lord of the Rings’ at six or seven, but it might as well have been written in Ancient Babylonian for all I actually got out of it.
I was instructed to try reading the bible now and then, but I always found it to be an indecipherable pain in the ass. If God was so smart why did he write in gibberish?
One day in grade 3, we were doing Silent Reading at our desks, and I had chanced upon some kind of abridged version of Robinson Crusoe that was completely enthralling. I was just getting into it when I noticed that my name was being called. Silent Reading time had apparently finished; 30 students had gotten up, walked past me and sat down on the carpet and I had absolutely no knowledge of hearing or seeing anything.
The dumbest part of this anecdote is that the teacher (Mrs Hamilton) was actually angry at me for not paying attention. I’d managed to connect so wholly with a text that I’d transcended my physical body, but this was apparently a sign of delinquency.
I went on to fall desperately in love with various books from time to time. Occasionally I was distressed at how difficult I found it was to disentangle my mind from an engrossing tale. One time I caught myself actually thinking in third person, which led me to believe that I would one day go insane.
However after seeing an ad on TV that claimed touching a soap dispenser would cause you to become unclean, I realised there’s no way I could become crazy enough to stand out from the general insanity of the world.
So what’s the point of this highly concise and phenomenally interesting narration?
Loving books is great. It’s fun and it gives you smarts in the brain.
So how do you inspire a child to read?
Read!
I don’t remember being told to read, or told that I would do well to love reading.
The people I looked up to loved books, so I loved books, and that’s been a real gift.
Moronic parents everywhere use the phrase “Do what I say, not what I do.”
This couldn’t be a more futile line.
Kids learn by copying. There’s even a bunch of studies that prove this.
So if you have a child and want them to be a good person, or you think that society could use a few more good people, just be that person.
Peace.
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