Peter writes his fourth essay on the love of reading and the perils of speedreading. Read on!
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
(Hamlet, II,ii)
Many years ago now, when I was in Grade XIII, my last year of high school, our class was treated to a course in ‘speed-reading,’ a skill its proponents claimed would enable us to read fast enough to be able to assimilate large amounts of prescribed reading material at university in an orderly fashion, as it was assigned, thereby relieving us of the anxiety of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of reading that would, we were told, be the university’s expectation of all undergraduates. Our high school was well-known for its disproportionate share of the city’s Ontario Scholars, and surely we would all long to have our names enshrined for all eternity on the prominently-displayed ‘Roll of Honour’ in the entrance hall, wouldn’t we? Well, absorbing the “techniques” of reading quickly would, it was alleged, heighten our chances of success in the three or four years of relentless reading that would be required of us soon.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
I have to confess that I responded badly to the invitation to join this class. I had been, in childhood, a voracious reader, regularly reading a book a day from the school library, reading much of it on the school bus home, unperturbed by my growing reputation as a bookworm. I had continued to read voluminously since, and resented the assumption that I was too slow or stupid to continue to read well. In retirement today, I regularly read in excess of 150 books a year, recording my reaction to each book in my diaries, but I am now, blessedly, freer to do so.
More importantly, I was aware, even then, half a century ago, that different books required different reading speeds. If reading material were more demanding, if the vocabulary or sentence structure were that of a bygone age, as was clearly the case with classic novels like Robinson Crusoe, it would take longer to read. If the subject matter itself was unfamiliar, the same would be the case. I vividly recall my pride when my father asked me to read out to him articles from the TIME magazine at the age of ten as I sat beside him in the car. I knew well, in my teenage years, that some poetry, and especially sonnets and Shakespearean soliloquys, cannot be read quickly. They need to be pondered and reflected upon over time. Unseemly haste was, and remains, fatal to understanding. The woman who “taught” the ‘speedo’ course was then unable to understand my passionate objections, and I was once even detained after school for volubly denouncing speed-reading’s “techniques,” but in those days adolescents were expected to mind their manners and keep silent. Needless to say, “speed-reading” has now, mercifully, fallen into disfavour. Too many graduates freely admit that they did not read all that was assigned. Reading lists for some classes have become optional, and the serious reading public has diminished in size. As bookstores vanish and media images proliferate, “media study” has now replaced much book-learning in the public education systems of North America, where ‘dumbing down’ now reigns supreme so that no child may be “left behind.”
Yet reading is still crucial for all aspects of life, and its benefits are legion. The skilled reader knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff, but he or she needs to read widely and frequently to be able to differentiate between the two. Regular reading needs to begin early. Young children love to be read to, for a love of story, of rhyme and repetition, seems to be innate to all humans from a very early age, and parental reading to children provides parent and child with opportunities for ‘bonding’. Reading for children and adults alike has great entertainment value, valuable as this is in its proper time and place, but there is much more. Reading provides escape from the stress of everyday living by exercising the imagination. It aids in vocabulary acquisition, and improves sentence structure in both oral and written expression. It also increases attention span, patience, and listening skills. Reading also, arguably even more importantly, counteracts the toxic distractions of ‘digital dependency.’ “Deep reading,” which will be explored in next month’s review of books dealing with ‘levels’ of reading readiness, improves cognitive processes by promoting reflection, emotional intelligence, and empathy, sometimes called ‘compassionate imagination.’ Studies have shown that reading not only helps you live longer, but also can make you a better person, as wide and critical reading is a form of self-improvement, as will shortly be seen.
To repeat: early reading is crucial, but it is never too late to begin. The writer Jane Gardam remembers how she, as a four-year-old, explained to her mother the meaning of the word ‘soporific’ that she had come across in a Beatrix Potter story about rabbits. She had worked out its meaning from its context, without the help of a dictionary. My granddaughter Marlowe, then only two years of age, remarked, as we passed a house undergoing renovations across the street while her parents and I were out for an evening walk, “There’s just one problem with that house. It has no windows.” This seemed a very adult way to describe the house, and the mystery of its source was solved later that evening when I read to her from her favourite bedtime story, Cinderella, the following words, delivered to her in the form of a warning from her fairy godmother: “There’s just one problem with our plan: you must leave the ball before midnight.” My son Adrian has always been a devoted reader. At the age of twelve, he wrote the following in connection with an assignment on Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf: “While Mowat was in the den, he realized that the wolf was not the bloodthirsty savage killer which it had been portrayed to be, for if it were to be as described, it could easily have attacked him when he was inside the den, alone and exposed, with no weaponry whatsoever.” The beautiful balance of this compound-complex sentence, with its correct use of the conditional and the legitimate use of the old-fashioned word ‘weaponry’ is testament to the various literary influences on his work that have borne fruit unconsciously, effortlessly, in his writing, as a direct result of his wide and thoughtful reading.
Allan Bloom, author of the seminal study The Closing of the American Mind, should have the last word on the importance of reading. He famously declared,
“The substance of my being has been formed by the books I learned to care for. They accompany me every minute of every day of my life, making me see much more and be much more than I could have been or seen.”
