I believe that a deep appreciation of literature takes a great deal of effort over many years. It is extremely important that readers learn how to identify books which are of interest to them and which they have the ability to read, but also challenge them. This usually requires assistance early on from parents, followed through as the child grows into an adult with assistance from librarians, teachers and professors, publishers (through selected reading lists and anthologies), and fellow readers. Without such assistance along the way, young readers may be left not finding material of appropriate and sufficient depth, and fall out of the habit of reading, and once out of that habit, will then face difficulty picking it up again for want of a critical skill set appropriate to the material that as adults should be of interest to them.
Thus most people do not get into reading, and if they do, they avoid the heavy stuff and instead burn through one serial/genre after another, which really is no different than sitting in front of the boob tube watching prime time drama and sit-coms.
My folks read to me from day one (well actually day two; on day one when I was presented to my mom she screamed “what is it?”, but that’s another story). My mom even typed up stories of her own to read to me. From early on, books read to me were a primary form of entertainment, and as soon as I could I learned to read so that I could have more fun.
There were few children in my neighbourhood, TV was limited (an old Marconi which needed fixing most of the time, very few channels, and extremely limited children’s programming – pre Sesame Street). In other words, books held a much more important role in my life than they would most kids today simply by virtue of there not being much else to do other than to play by myself.
Grade one was particularly significant for me, for the day prior to school starting in the fall I fell out of a tree and landed in traction in the hospital for a few months. For those months, I read most of each day (The World of Pooh was my fav!).
Once out of the hospital, my folks gave me my first library card. What an adventure going to the library was! Every couple of weekends, the whole family would pile into the car and head downtown to the small limestone building, where my sister and I would stand in awe at all the books, knowing that with the hot little cards in our hands, we could each have any three of them until our next trip for more. What a life-long love affair that card began!
I didn’t notice any difference between me and other kids until grade four, when our teacher let us pick books for him to read to us. Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys were the fare chosen by my classmates. By that time I had read enough to have begun developing a critical awareness, and found that Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys did not hold my attention the way Stevenson, Dumas, Kipling ang Carroll did.
By our teenage years the critical gap had grown, which gave me a huge advantage in English class in highschool and later at university, for although we could all read well enough, I had a much greater ability to place what we read within a critical, cultural and historical context thanks to already having read a great whumping pile of stuff over the previous years. This in turn led to career opportunities for me that my chums did not have (I ended up first an English professor and later a lawyer), and more importantly, has left me with the skill set necessary to read at a high level in a wide range of areas, rather than just at one level or in one area. If the right combination of encouragement, assistance and resources had not been available to me as a developing reader, I don’t think I’d be the reader I am today.
I read all these incredibly inane, yet addictive, R.L. Stine books. In addition, I used to buy lots of “young adult” books out of these newsprint Scholastic book orders we used to get at school.
those rocked…er, back then.