I do not like reading.
I never finished the Harry Potter series. I have been stuck on book 6 since I graduated high school. I only read part of the first book in the Eragon series. I have not read the Lightening Thief. I have not read any of Brandon Sanderson's books. I have not read Chronicles of Narnia or the Lord of the Rings. And for the most part, I have no interest in doing so (except for Lord of the Rings, I do want to read that eventually).
I'm sure there are many a gasps and jaw drops to that confession.
Think of another classic fictional book that practically everyone has read, and I probably haven't read it. Well, ok I did read all three books in the Hunger Games series. And again, I have read most of the Harry Potter books. But sitting down with a good book is not my go to thing, and it never was. Don't get me wrong, there are times that I enjoy that, but not consistently. Usually, there are plenty of other things I'd rather be doing than reading a book.
Why?
Because, frankly, they are boring. Yes. You heard that right. They are BORING! Yes, I know, that's blasphemy. But it's truly how I feel.
Here's what usually happens when I start reading a book: I get super in to it. The beginning hooks me in. Then I get somewhere in the middle, the pacing slows and I lose interest. I'll keep trying for a little bit, but I ultimately I just get SO BORED, and... squirrel! Alice is off doing something else.
95% of the time this is the backstory as to why I haven't finished most of the books I started. The few books I have on the shelf are those that I did actually finish or want to finish. They aren't many. Books do interest me sometimes. Usually it's not long enough to stay engaged though. Something else will come along that interests me more, and then the book just starts collecting dust for the next few weeks... months... sometimes even years before I get around to finishing it.
Books just... simply don't interest me in the same way they interest other people.
Part of it probably has to due with what I am convinced is some sort of undiagnosed ADD. Books demand a huge amount of undivided attention, and this was not something I was able to give as a kid, nor did I want to. I still can't do it to this day. Even if I tried, there were plenty of other fun things that I wanted to do more than read. Playing with my Playmobiles, going outside, watching TV, playing Spyro, drawing, playing with my toy pikachu, riding my bike, etc. Any one of these I would have gladly done before reading.
And stupid. That's how I felt. Stupid.
...
Wow. I didn't realize until I typed those sentences how deeply this hurt, and how long I've been carrying this. I. Felt. Stupid. "Why can't you be more like the A students!?" I didn't like reading to begin with, but I liked it even less when it was associated with being smart. The more books you read, the smarter you were. The better you were! But I didn't read a lot of books, so I must not have been smart. I was not as good as the other kids.
My teacher in 5th grade had a poster on the wall that kept track of how many books each student read. It was some sort of "fun" contest. Our grades weren't penalized for it, but what I lacked was there for all the other kids to see. While some kids had like, what, 10+ tallies by their name, I had maybe 2 or 3. Even when I did want to read, it always took me so long to finish the dang book and I couldn't understand why.
Meanwhile, I was one of those kids that watched too much TV. I loved movies. They just mesmerized my imagination! BUT!!! Too much TV makes you dumb, the teachers said. I watched TV, and I liked that way more than books. So I must have been dumb. That's why you can't read books. You're too dumb! You need to be more like the smart kids! They are the good part of the statistics!
Of course none of that is true (well, except the watching too much TV part), but even now there is this unspoken assumption that if you don't like reading, you must not have much of an imagination. You must not be very interesting. Heck, maybe you're even kinda shallow.
It's not true. But the stereotype is there, and it's a strong one that people don't realize they hold to, especially if they are someone who is an avid reader. Admit it. If you're a proud bookworm, you've probably thought something like that when meeting people who don't like to read. Or that might just be my insecurities talking, but these insecurities had to start from somewhere. The internet also reinforces this mindset to some degree, what with the rabid fandoms and such. *Hisssss* "How DARE you question my holy gospel you illiterate infidelllll!!!"
My reading habits did get better as I grew older. I found some books I enjoyed, such as Child of the Wolves, White Fang (my favorite to this day), Coyote Autumn, The Hobbit, Dracula, The Secret Life of Bees, the Warriors series, and Of Mice and Men. But even then, these discoveries remained few and far between. I just preferred not to read, and it never really occurred to me that that preference was just as valid as the other. Thinking about that, I have to wonder how many other people like me do not realize this, considering how much pressure we were under in school to read and read and read.
Granted, electronics exacerbates this in often negative ways, but even then... Some people do not like reading and there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that!!!! Reading is good. It should be encouraged. Everyone, especially developing minds, needs to do some of it. But not everyone wants to read 10+ books a summer, and that's not a bad thing as long as they still read something! And if it's not in the assigned curriculum, no student should ever be shamed for not wanting to read at home. It's counter productive to do so. If they want to read something extra, then they will do it. Otherwise, let them explore their own interests. There is nothing wrong with that!
I wish this is something I'd known back in grade school. I wish this is something teachers would have emphasized more. I'm sure that at some level they were all aware of it, but there was definitely a bias towards rewarding a student for reading lots of books vs. rewarding a student for drawing lots of pictures, which is what I did.
And in realizing this, I also came to another epiphany about myself. It's not that I never read. I did read a lot actually. I just read different things.
In first and second grade it was all about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were my favorite thing! So if there was a book about dinosaurs, I wanted it! Then I would draw pictures and tell my own stories about them. And then I would read it again.
A few years later my interests turned to Dingos. So I read books about dingos. Then dog breeds. Then coyotes. Then... WOLVES!!! I freakin loved wolves and, like dinosaurs, would consume whatever wolf literature came my way. During reading time, I would pull out the encyclopedia collection my teacher had, and read from that. When the wolf reading was exhausted, I turned to other animals. Cougars, bobcats, orcas, elephants, monkeys, bears, sharks, etc.
This was happening at the same time as that 5th grade reading poster I mentioned earlier. Mind you, the books I was reading were not all short picture books. Some of these were heavy stuff not written for a 10 year old audience, and yet I was gobbling them up with the same kind of passion that my classmates had for the new Harry Potter books. Then Google became a thing, and you can imagine how much more excited I got about my research.
Yet strangely, none of that ever counted towards the reading wall, not even the more advanced stuff. It never counted towards weekly reading hours either. It never occurred to me or my teacher that what I was doing was in fact... well... reading! I don't remember ever being rewarded for that. If there was any attention given to it at all, it was in the form of gentle teasing.
Middle School saw a return to fiction books, although I would only read them if they had to do with animals. Then high school turned to reading online about history, news, religion, and politics. This was where reading for me really exploded, but I never realized it at that time. This kind of reading continued through college, and now to the present.
I love reading scientific papers. I love reading articles discussing sociology, history, science and art. I love reading anthropology books. I love reading historic letters from our Founding Fathers. I loved reading through several of my college textbooks. Heck, I've bought a few discounted, discontinued textbooks from the BYU Store just so I could read them! At no point did I ever enroll in an Ichthyology class, but recently the subject interested me, so I bought an old textbook about it. Do I love it? YES! And I'm using it to spearhead a project at work.
And I love reading these things because they are fun! They are interesting! They make me think! They draw me in in ways that plain fiction chapter books never have.
When I tried to quantify all the time I've spent reading this stuff from childhood on, I realized that it's not that I don't like reading. I just like reading different things! This entire time... I have been smart, I have loved reading, but I never realized it because of the K-12 school system's inflexible idea of what leisurely reading was supposed to look like. Like I said, at no point were my reading interests rewarded or meaningfully encouraged, at least not until high school, and even then... classroom dynamics were often so impersonal that it was easy to be missed in the crowd. So this on top of the fact that I'd associated the concept of "reading" with negative feelings for so long, I never made the connection until now.
So yeah. I actually DO, in fact, like reading. I just don't like reading your books. (And I have absolutely no interest in finishing Harry Potter.)
Going along with that, even though fiction books are not my first choice, I do have a very active imagination. I always have. I see things in very vivid, colorful images. I put things into a certain kind of narrative in my head. I create stories all the time, because that's how I make sense of things. I just haven't been able to write them down effectively for years. I'm still learning how to, because of how complicated and intricate these visual things in my head can be.
For this reason, I have become hooked on reading webcomics. WebToons in my new favorite thing. I've been reading these in part to help me develop my own style for the stories I plan on illustrating. It is amazing the kind of work and creativity that goes into this medium of storytelling. And it makes sense to me that I would resonate with this, because of the way my brain visually processes things.
Yet when we talk about reading, for some reason one's interest in reading comics takes a back burner to reading a traditional book. You're seen as a nerd for reading lots of books. You're seen as an extra nerd for reading lots of comics. Why is that? There are some truly incredible graphic novels out there that took real skill to create. Not all comics are created equal. Some are cheap and some are amazing, just as with written books. The experience may not be entirely the same, but it's still effectively telling a story nonetheless, and frankly I've gotten more pleasure out of reading some of these than Harry Potter. It's not that I dislike Harry Potter... it's just that the medium and the way it was written (let's face it, some of those books drag on and on!) did not speak to me the same way these visual pieces do.
This begs the question: does preferring a more visual storytelling medium mean a lack of imagination? Or a lack of patience? I don't think so. Humanity has been telling stories via visual pieces of art long before the written word, and humanity has continued to do so even after. And there are some extremely pivotal artworks that conveyed a message that words alone would not have conveyed so poignantly. We value the arts, but what's the point of valuing art if simultaneously we expect everyone's brains to function imaginatively without any kind of visual stimulus? And then if one does express their ideas visually, it's somehow inferior to those who expresses theirs through words? Why do art at all if that's the case?
Also, what about oral communication? Some people get more out of audiobooks than they do just reading. I've actually found that to be true for myself as well. Is that to be seen as lesser?
That was a bit of a tangent, but the point is... I think there are many assumptions about reading and the like our society carries that are just not correct. In my opinion, there has already been many discussions about how it's wrong to see reading as nerdy and uncool, and those discussions should continue. But I also think it needs to be emphasized that
1. Just because you don't like to read or have trouble focusing on reading, that does not make you stupid or intellectually inferior to those that do. There is nothing wrong with preferring not to read.
2. Those in the education field should recognize that desires to read do not just manifest as kids reading fiction. There is an overemphasis on this when it comes to getting kids to read. Maybe a child isn't reading because the genres you're pushing are not interesting to them. A child reading fact sheets about sharks is still a child reading.
3. There are other forms of communication and storytelling besides the standard, written book. They have their place and benefits too.
No comments:
Post a Comment