Many of my friends in the teaching fraternity were happy to hear author Amitav Ghosh tell a young woman that the best advice he had for a writer-in-the-making was “to read.” It’s something we keep telling our own students, but (we tend to think) it is one advice that is disregarded the most. But then, those same students would ask, aren’t we reading all the time? What, other than reading, are we doing each time we pick up a book to study for an examination or a test? If you search online for the distinction between the terms, as I just did, you’d be hard pressed to find a clear one. “Studying is an advanced form of reading,” says one contributor on quora.com. Wikipedia defines reading as “the act or process of studying.”
But let us set aside those academic or dictionary distinctions, for the time being, and get to what I mean by reading. Not studying. Not swotting from notes for an exam. Not going over and over the textbook to memorise definitions or descriptions. Not poring over a reference text in order to add to the classroom lecture.
With all the information around us, we are spending more and more time engaging with texts of different kinds. We scan Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, we click on video links and laugh at visual and verbal memes that come our way, we look at articles that our friends share so that we can either like them or add a comment, thus marking our participation in the great online social space.
But when was the last time you picked up a book or a magazine for pure pleasure and curiosity, without your fingers itching to hit a “like” or a “share” or type in a smart comment? Again, I am not talking about the hurried scanning of headlines on paper or screen that most of us do before we rush out each morning, but a more sustained, sitting-down submersion in words.
Reading for its own sake is what we are talking about here. There is a difference between this and reading for the purpose of knowledge acquisition — although I would argue that reading of all kinds leads to knowledge gain in the long run (much of what I know about life in the Roman empire comes from the Asterix comics). When you study, there is a certain anxiety that keeps you focused only on what is necessary for that exam or test. Purposive reading (to learn, to understand, to remember) is limited by its purpose. When you read without that anxiety, your mind is free to wander about and make connections with other things you’ve read, to relate what you are reading to your own life and experiences, or to stop and think and consider something the writer has said. This kind of reading also develops the ability to look beyond the surface meanings of the words to what is held between them. When we are freed from purpose, our minds can begin to appreciate a piece of writing more fully.
When we read this way, it feeds back into our academic reading — that is, reading as a process of studying. We become more efficient readers because we are able to scan a text quickly and grasp its meaning without too much difficulty. We can figure out which parts of the text are important and which ones are only supportive. While reading a novel, for instance, we know that description is used to set a scene while action and dialogue move the plot forward. Over time, as we read more novels, we understand where to pay attention, where to dwell on the words and where to skim over them. We get the plot even if we don’t always get the details.
I hate to think that I am advocating reading for pleasure as a way to improve one’s ability to read academically — that would seem to be self-defeating! The hope is that even if people begin reading because they think it is useful, they will begin to enjoy it for its own sake!
Granted, the time we have for extra-curricular reading is gradually being eaten away by other, supposedly more urgent tasks (like moving to the next level on our favourite gaming app or catching up on social media). But we also have more reading material available to us today than at any point of time in the past. Books are easier to get, more people are writing about more subjects, and they are also available in a variety of forms such as e-books and audiobooks. That would imply that more people are reading. So, perhaps my colleagues and I are wrong about young people not reading. So, maybe it’s not so much about whether people are reading, but about how they are reading?
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus magazine. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com
