Read, Just Read
Greetings, fellow readers,
“Read, just read”—that’s the mantra. One can find it repeated by parents, self-styled experts, teachers, and professors alike.
And they aren’t wrong. That’s the difficulty. But as with horoscopes, they’re only generally correct.
I remember one fairly well-regarded high school teacher trumpeting that the best way to perform well on standardized tests is to simply read more. That’s nifty, but if a student is already a junior in high school, “read more” just doesn’t cut it as timely advice. To use a common example, I can re-read Harry Potter obsessively, but that won’t necessarily make me more prepared for, say, reading a passage on pottery. (Yes, I’ll have a future essay on re-reading! Though I doubt one on pottery…)
I appreciate Harry Potter’s ability to grab the attention of students. And if you think I have someone in your family in mind, you’re probably wrong. I once designed an entire reading curriculum around Harry Potter. I didn’t teach it—I simply passed that student along to an instructor a bit more devoted to that world of wizardry. Harry Potter, then, can function quite well as a gateway read: The world is good, the story is good, the writing is not. Two out of three makes for a very good book.
Just reading Harry Potter, though, won’t develop enough of the mind, enough of the background knowledge useful for a lifetime of learning. If a student is weak enough (or a contented reluctant reader), Harry Potter is as good a starting place as any, and better than some.
So I don’t subscribe to the snobbery that one must “read the classics” to develop cultural literacy and whatever other hobnobbing of trivia certain scholars pretend is the goal of education. I am personally delighted by Shakespeare, have read most of Robert Louis Stevenson, and revel in Plato (in translation). I’ve never read The Great Gatsby; I intend to die that way; and I don’t think my “literacy” has suffered in the slightest.
Read the classics: they are often accorded that title for a reason. There are, however, a lot of classics. A person would need to be blind to present-day cultural literacy—blind to cultural phenomena like Harry Potter—to account for every classic ever. And, here I must be quite clear, purely reading the classics wouldn’t necessarily help you navigate life or the texts found on standardized tests. While that latter category is fairly irrelevant in most cases, the former is rather relevant.
This is not least because the majority of people obsessed with “the classics” really mean readings from the humanities. Apparently, On the Origin of Species and A Sand County Almanac can be dispensed with.
The further difficulty with a literary-classics-only approach is that you end up leaving out seminal works like Daniel Sarewitz’s “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse” or Trudy Govier’s Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, to cite two recent paradigm-challenging works. (I’d write “paradigm-shifting” but enough dullards within those two authors’ respective disciplines avoid awareness of their writing that I won’t overstate their influence, regardless of their significance.)
Few people, if any, would truly espouse a literary-classics-only approach, but that’s where their tone and chosen examples tend to lead. If their sloppy discourse leads to wider interpretation of their point than they might intend, well, that’s at least partly on them.
So what on earth do I intend if “just reading” any random thing won’t do, but then I won’t trumpet the classics?
I intend to note one simple thing: almost any reading is better than no reading, but some reading is better than other reading.
Everyone reads. People who claim to be “non-readers” somehow manage to navigate emails and texts. (Yes, there are genuinely illiterate individuals, but they are different from non-readers or below-grade readers. My point here is obviously not addressing the problem of near or complete illiteracy.)
So those who are “non-readers”—please instead call them what they are: reluctant readers—can read. They do read. And this is overall a good thing. The challenge is to expand what they read and when.
But even most voracious readers require some assistance. I hear it from parents; I hear it from adults; I hear from teens. “How can someone struggle with reading when they read so much?”
Allow me to return to the Harry Potter example. Reading that series might prepare me for reading Lord of the Rings, The Broken Earth, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or The Book of the New Sun, though those would present a significant stretch. But Harry Potter won’t prepare me for reading Educated, Frankenstein, or Macbeth—at least not without several intermediating reads between.
Being a voracious reader is a great starting place, but voracious readers aren’t necessarily known for their taste in books. (If you’ve never met one, they’re the sort of person who gives you a list of fifty books you Must. Read. This. Instance. They might also bore you with the plot of some insipid book that you wouldn’t care about if you were left alone on a desert island with no other entertainment. They are near cousins of the Netflix documentarian boors—the ones who’ve watched one video on the plight of bees and now lecture you and everyone else on their every movement in the hive. There’s nothing quite like being TED-Talked to death.)
So voracious readers still need to think through what sort of reading they’ve developed dexterity with, and which they would find themselves fumbling through. That is, voracious readers still need some reps in areas in which they are less likely to find themselves reading regularly.
Whatever sort of reader you might be, if you aren’t reading a wide variety of material with regularity, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself struggling with a new genre or style of writing.
Educators sometimes talk of scaffolding reads, material that serves to bridge a book or essay for students. Now, I think scaffolding can be overdone. I’m all for jumping in and beating my head against a text for a while. Such struggling genuinely serves students to learn material better. Just not all the time.
Sometimes scaffolding is necessary. And this is even more the case for the reluctant reader crowd. Finding intermediary reads is crucial. They can be short. Use a single-page short story; add a single-page essay. There’s a reason my reading comprehension app incorporates passages that are predominantly between 35 and 75 words.
The intermediary reads can also be quite long, but of an easier reading level. (I think the idea of levels like Lexile numbers is mostly poppycock, as I know how they’re created; but as a metaphor for the idea that some reads are more challenging than others, it’s evocative enough.) Harry Potter is, of course, an example we’ve seen already. Agatha Christie’s mysteries would be another.
(For those of you familiar with my methods, you might be wondering how I can commend intermediary reads, as I tend to throw reads at students that are ostensibly several “levels” above their comprehension. Well, if an individual has a master guide alongside, the guide can help accelerate the student through the read. This essay is intended for the self-guided reader.)
Remember, our mantra isn’t “read, just read.” It’s that “almost any reading is better than no reading, but some reading is better than other reading.”
This way, you can read what you like, because almost any reading is better than no reading. On occasion, you might think through whether there is some better reading you could do—perhaps even better reading that’s still reading you like!
So don’t just read. You’re probably already doing that. If you want to improve as a reader, challenge yourself with some reps outside your comfort zone.
For today, my suggested reads aren’t of my own collection. Instead, I send you “reading in a time of anxiety.” You can probably guess which of that list I’d likely recommend. Perhaps not coincidentally to my sharing of this list, I’ve had friends write doctoral dissertations on two of the authors mentioned. (I’m rather excited to try a few of these out myself—great ghost stories? Count me in.)
Happy reading to you all,
Kreigh
P.S. Yesterday’s read is a paired read with today’s, so you might wish to read it after this piece if you haven’t yet.