"Reflecting on Reading"

First of all, I want to start off this week by saying that Pawley's article was DENSE! I fought my way through it and ultimately read the whole thing, but not without difficulty and likely not with the depth of understanding that I should have had. That being said, I very much enjoyed the Ross article (for the most part). My basic reactions to the article center on the final section, "Reflecting on Reading" (hence the title of this post). I did have some interesting recollections regarding the point Ross made about young readers needing to be encouraged to read, as I was quite the opposite. At the end of the school year every year in elementary school, teachers would encourage students to read over the summer, in hopes that they would maintain the skills that they had gained through the school year. I remember very distinctly my parents talking to my teachers after this speech, telling them "Please encourage John NOT to read!", mostly because I would spend hours upon hours reading, with absolutely no desire to be outside, even on the nicest of days. My parents finally came up with the plan that, if I was going to read, I had to be outside to do it. I hated them for that fact, because the indoor furniture was much more comfortable and didn't have as many bugs as the swing in the backyard or the picnic blanket that they set up for me under a peach tree. I still feel much the same way, that I would rather be indoors than out, and that I would much rather read than exercise a lot of the time. I do have to admit, though, that the requirements of reading for class have significantly dampened my love of reading, so that I often spend leisure time watching TV or browsing the Internet, though by no means has it been crushed altogether. So anyway, now that I've finished that tangent, my main point was that I've always had my own motivation for reading, so much so that my parents had to try to discourage me sometimes.

Now to respond to some of the questions posed in the final section. I find it very interesting and in fact a little disturbing that I actually can't identify my "earliest" reading memory. I think that's largely due to the fact that I've been reading for longer than I can remember, both reading along as my mom would read aloud to me and later by myself. I suppose my one significant reading memory was being allowed to pick books off the "sixth-grade shelf" while my classmates were only allowed to read at the "appropriate" second-grade level. Of course, it was around second grade that I discovered the Hardy Boys, which long remained as some of my favorite readings (fiction!? in a series!? the horror!). While fiction remains my strong preference in reading materials, with the great satisfaction of finishing a story, I have actually read a few nonfiction books (for pleasure) since I got to graduate school. Granted, they were mostly related to chemistry in one way or another, but nonfiction is a genre that I wouldn't have touched in my teenage years. Thus, I wouldn't say that my reading interests changed as an adolescent, but rather changed as I reached my 20s. I have trouble responding to several other questions in the list, too, such as a book/story that stands out in my memory. When asked my favorite book, I readily have the answer: "The Ruby in the Smoke" by Philip Pullman, which I first read in early eighth grade on the recommendation of my school librarian. Pullman quickly became my favorite author, but was replaced later by Diana Wynne Jones because Pullman doesn't write enough. Now ask me the plot. Well, it's about a girl named Sally Lockhart whose father has recently died. There is a large ruby that factors into the story (clearly, from the title), and the Smoke is that generated in the opium dens of 19th-century England. I know that there was something to do with the shipping industry in the Orient. I remember a line from the first page: "Her name was Sally Lockhart, and in fifteen minutes she was going to kill a man." Beyond that, I can tell you almost nothing about what happened. I was SO wrapped up in the story, reading it so fast, that I can't even remember half of the plot. It's that engagement that makes me love a story, the ability to "lose myself" in a story. So that kind of tells you something about me: books don't make a big impact on me, at least not in a sense that I can recount everything that happened. I'm much more likely to recount something from a book I hated, like "Walden", where Thoreau is quite hypocritical about his explanation of "isolation", where he lives alone but daily travels into town to catch up on the latest gossip. The worst part, and the icing on the hypocrisy cake, is that the then slips out the back way for fear of having to talk to some of the townspeople. That's just what gossiping is! But I digress. Either way, I think I've made my point about reading for me: it is a great pleasure for me, but specific books don't necessarily make an "impact" of affecting my life in any realizable way.

One last point to make before I wrap this up, responding to a bit of the Pawley article. It tells us that the reading habits of many 19th-century people can be tracked using their postal records. Does this not sound like a major invasion of privacy? In this day and age of fear about having our identities compromised, I find this to be an extremely hypocritical method of gaining information, even if it's long after the people in question are long dead.