Ccording to Eisenstein, What Does a Reading Public Lose in Their Sense of Community Life?
I t's of import for people to tell y'all what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. And then, I am going to exist talking to you most reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasance, is ane of the nearly of import things one can do. I'k going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, apparently and enormously: I'one thousand an author, often an writer of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, more often than not by making things up and writing them down. It is evidently in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to be and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading tin occur.
So I'grand biased equally a writer. Only I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.
And I'thousand hither giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to requite everyone an equal risk in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about this night. I want to talk about what reading does. What it's skilful for.
I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth manufacture in America. The prison house industry needs to programme its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what per centum of 10 and xi-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasance.
It'due south not i to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.
And I call back some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to plough the folio, the demand to keep going, even if it'due south difficult, because someone'due south in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to finish … that's a very existent drive. And it forces yous to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you acquire that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. At that place were noises made briefly, a few years ago, almost the idea that nosotros were living in a mail-literate world, in which the ability to brand sense out of written words was somehow redundant, merely those days are gone: words are more important than they e'er were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the spider web, we need to follow, to communicate and to cover what nosotros are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot commutation ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.
The simplest fashion to brand sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to prove them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't call up there is such a thing as a bad volume for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to indicate at a subset of children's books, a genre, possibly, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should exist stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, and so were dozens of others. Comics take been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It'southward tosh. Information technology's snobbery and information technology'south foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children similar and want to read and seek out, because every child is unlike. They can observe the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the kickoff time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because yous feel they are reading the incorrect affair. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the aforementioned taste as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that yous like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll air current up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will motion them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, practise not practise what this writer did when his eleven-year-former daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you lot liked those you'll dear this! Holly read nothing merely safe stories of settlers on prairies for the residuum of her teenage years, and nonetheless glares at me when Stephen King'southward name is mentioned.)
And the 2nd thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch Telly or see a flick, you lot are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something y'all build upward from 26 letters and a scattering of punctuation marks, and you, and you lonely, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other optics. You get to experience things, visit places and worlds yous would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out in that location is a me, besides. Yous're being someone else, and when you return to your own earth, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for edifice people into groups, for allowing us to function every bit more cocky-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your mode in the world. And it's this:
The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can exist different.
I was in Red china in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It'south simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. Just they did non innovate and they did not invent. They did non imagine. So they sent a delegation to the Usa, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the futurity about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you a dissimilar world. It tin can have you lot somewhere you lot've never been. In one case yous've visited other worlds, similar those who ate fairy fruit, you lot can never exist entirely content with the earth that you grew upward in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, exit them ameliorate, leave them different.
And while nosotros're on the field of study, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about every bit if it's a bad thing. Equally if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used past the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If yous were trapped in an incommunicable state of affairs, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you lot ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is simply that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where yous are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more than importantly, during your escape, books can too give you knowledge most the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give y'all armour: existent things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you tin use to escape for real.
Every bit JRR Tolkien reminded u.s., the merely people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Some other way to destroy a child's dear of reading, of form, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an splendid local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could exist persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to piece of work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not heed a pocket-size, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his style through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children'due south' library I began on the adult books.
They were expert librarians. They liked books and they liked the books beingness read. They taught me how to lodge books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery almost anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed lilliputian boy who loved to read, and would talk to me most the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me every bit another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was non used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of advice. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the solar day nosotros go out school or academy), about entertainment, virtually making safe spaces, and nigh access to data.
I worry that hither in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, information technology may seem blowsy or outdated in a world in which most, only not all, books in impress exist digitally. Merely that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I retrieve information technology has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of data scarcity, and having the needed information was always of import, and always worth something: when to constitute crops, where to notice things, maps and histories and stories – they were ever skillful for a meal and company. Information was a valuable affair, and those who had information technology or could obtain information technology could charge for that service.
In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to 1 driven past an information overabundance. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information every bit we did from the dawn of culture until 2003. That's about five exobytes of information a 24-hour interval, for those of you lot keeping score. The claiming becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, just finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to demand help navigating that information to discover the thing we really need.
Libraries are places that people go to for data. Books are only the tip of the data iceberg: they are in that location, and libraries can provide yous freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and sound. But libraries are likewise, for instance, places that people, who may not accept computers, who may not accept internet connections, tin get online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you detect out about jobs, utilise for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can assist these people navigate that world.
I do non believe that all books volition or should drift onto screens: equally Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than than 20 years earlier the Kindle turned up, a physical volume is like a shark. Sharks are one-time: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are amend at existence sharks than annihilation else is. Concrete books are tough, difficult to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel practiced in your hand: they are good at being books, and at that place will ever be a place for them. They vest in libraries, just as libraries accept already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every denizen equal access to it. That includes wellness information. And mental health data. It's a community infinite. It's a identify of safety, a oasis from the world. It'southward a place with librarians in information technology. What the libraries of the hereafter volition be similar is something we should exist imagining now.
Literacy is more than important than ever it was, in this earth of text and e-mail, a globe of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, cover what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries actually are the gates to the futurity. Then it is unfortunate that, round the world, nosotros discover local regime seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
Co-ordinate to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Evolution, England is the "just country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and blazon of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put information technology some other way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than nosotros are. They are less able to navigate the globe, to sympathize information technology to solve problems. They tin be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the earth in which they discover themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And every bit a land, England will autumn behind other developed nations because information technology will lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we larn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
I think we have responsibilities to the time to come. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of u.s. – equally readers, every bit writers, equally citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If nosotros read for pleasance, if others meet us reading, then nosotros acquire, we exercise our imaginations. Nosotros bear witness others that reading is a good thing.
Nosotros have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries and so you do non value data or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the by and you lot are damaging the hereafter.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make information technology interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they acquire to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding fourth dimension, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
We have an obligation to use the language. To push button ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what nosotros mean. Nosotros must non to try to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, only we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and especially writers for children, only all writers – take an obligation to our readers: information technology'southward the obligation to write truthful things, particularly important when we are creating tales of people who practice not exist in places that never were – to sympathise that truth is not in what happens merely what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, afterwards all. We have an obligation non to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. I of the best cures for a reluctant reader, afterward all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while nosotros must tell our readers true things and requite them weapons and give them armour and pass on any wisdom we accept gleaned from our short stay on this green earth, nosotros have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to forcefulness predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we take an obligation never, ever, nether any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.
We have an obligation to empathise and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing of import work, considering if we mess it up and write deadening books that plough children away from reading and from books, nosotros 've lessened our own future and macerated theirs.
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We take an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that nosotros are in a world in which society is huge and the private is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. Just the truth is, individuals alter their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things tin can be unlike.
Look around you: I hateful it. Intermission, for a moment and wait effectually the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It'southward this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided information technology was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right at present without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.
We have an obligation to make things cute. Not to leave the world uglier than we institute it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our bug for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean upwards after ourselves, and not go out our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who practice not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to human activity to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of political party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked once how nosotros could make our children intelligent. His reply was both uncomplicated and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we tin can requite our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and empathise.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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