As a child my Sundays were thoroughly boring. Our parents bought every newspaper there was to read and sat behind broadsheets for much of the day. It was a very visual experience as they literally disappeared behind the headlines. And yet we could sense their pleasure in this pastime, as they shared between them news or opinions about what they were reading and discussed the events of the day. A friend of my older sister’s remembers it as a scary time when my parents would expect them to have read the papers and be ready to share comments at the lunch table!
Nonetheless, my parents’ pleasure was tangible and so, as I open up my newspapers at weekends now, I think of them and take delight in sitting on the sofa with countless bits of paper around me, taking in news and opinion. I realize we are supposed to read online for environmental reasons but the problem with this is that, unlike our own childhood or that of my sons, children are not seeing what their parents are doing. The parents may well be reading the newspaper, or a book, but if it is on screen the child has no visual clue as to what the parent is looking at.
Children watch adults and learn from them. If you play music in the home they are likely to do so in their own homes. If they see you read, they are more likely to do so themselves. And so it is important that children see adults reading books and newspapers if we want them to get off their screens and into books. But what do they see around them? More-or-less every adult on a tube train is on their screen. Almost zero physical newspapers are being read in front of them and very few physical books.
It is therefore very important that parents and adults share what they are doing, talk about what they are reading, explain their interest and pleasure, or the emotions that are being stirred by it. Paint the pictures, conjure up the characters.
Graphic novels can get children and adults reading but they don’t stimulate the imagination in the way a book does. Our brains have to work quite hard – though it doesn’t feel like work – to imagine what a landscape might look like, what a character might look like, their clothes, hair, height. They have to imagine scenes, emotions, expressions, looks exchanged between characters. They also develop empathy – feel fearful for what might happen to someone, sad about a tragedy, or angry at unfairness or cruelty (I’ll never forget Black Beauty). Often then when you go to a movie of the book it does not match one’s imagination. But that’s ok because one’s imagination has already been awoken and stimulated and taken into many different worlds beyond one’s own.
Children who watch movies and TV series are stimulated and drawn into stories but the director and producer have done the creative work of imagining, taking the words off a page and bringing them to life. When we read a book, we do this for ourselves.
The Times and Sunday Times have a project on at the moment to “Get Britain Reading” and are encouraging people to volunteer to read in schools and donate books. I’ve written about the subject of reading before, back in 2017, in relation to a lack of literacy in prisoners “Reading wakes us shakes us and shapes us: which books woke you?” You can read it on that link if you choose to do so. Having recently attended both the Cheltenham Literary Festival and the Wimbledon Book Festival I have been reassured, by the huge numbers of people crowding the talks, that there are still adults reading books. Now we have to encourage the kids, teenagers and young adults to adopt it instead of scrolling.
Reading is a habit. It’s easy to lose the habit and, like any change of behaviour, can feel awkward for a period of time as you try to re-engage but then becomes easy because losing yourself in a book is exciting. But we all know how addictive scrolling on one’s mobile is and this is what children are facing. We know it as adults and must show them the way, and when I say show, I mean visually show them that we are reading a book or paper even if it is on screen, but preferably, at least occasionally, on paper. Take them to a bookshop or library, make it a fun outing. As a child, one of the favourite events of my week was to go to the public library. I can picture it now, all those years ago, the quiet, the smell of books, the feel of the pages, the little red ticket, the sound of the stamp, then the delight in returning home and losing myself in those scenes.
Here’s the poem I wrote about that memory:
Saturday at the Public Library
Entering the silence,
a stillness of concentration,
quiet shuffling of pages turning,
a scrape of chair leg,
the ‘tut’ or ‘sssh’
of tetchy adults
waiting to be disturbed.
Then the tiptoed walk
in short white socks, Start-Rite sandals,
squeaking rubber soles of embarrassment
sweaty hand on the brass-handled door
to the Children’s Section,
a never-never land of exploration
as exciting an adventure as the North Pole.
Sacrosanct hours of mind and page,
I’d settle in to touch and scent
of red, green and blue bound books,
musty paper of patchwork worlds
and transporting words.
The prize clasped carefully,
anticipation heightened by the thud of the date stamp.
Today’s libraries open to a different quiet:
a bright screen, door to the world,
feasts of libraries, blogs, museums, news,
too much to take in or digest.
A few books hold on to their shelves
but paper becomes obsolete in the cold world
of a tapping keyboard.
Let’s hold onto the magic of books we hold in our hands as well as being awe-inspired by what our tapping keyboard can bring. We don’t have to lose one for the addictive demands of the other. We can enjoy both – and talk about it.
