Reading is FUN-damental

From the "This is news?" Department:

"New Assignment: Pick Books You Like"

Front page news, too, apparently.

It seems that, in a radical rethinking of age-old pedagogical wisdom, English teachers are promoting the idea that students can find more enjoyment in reading (and thus improve their reading skills) by--wait for it--reading things they actually want to read. Shocking, we know. Still, it's nice to hear that the Solipsist has been on the right track all along, simply encouraging students to read, regardless of the inherent nutritional value of the words consumed.

The Solipsist has had a pretty much lifelong love of reading, inculcated in him not least by his English teacher mother and free-lance writer father. But even he found many of the works he was forced to read onerous. Of the dozens of books he read as class assignments, he can count on one hand the number of books he actually enjoyed at the time: Lord of the Flies was nifty. Pride and Prejudice was surprisingly delightful. All the King's Men was spectacular. But even the books that you would think would be right up our alley--Dracula, Frankenstein, The Odyssey--left us cold. And while, in our maturity (not to say dotage) we have come to appreciate these works, along with Hamlet and Heart of Darkness and Jane Eyre and other canonical works, one major reason for our lack of enthusiasm was the fact that we were essentially forced to read these books and told they were good for us. But back when the classics were first published, nobody read them for their health--they read them (or didn't) because they were entertaining (or not).

Critics fret that, left to their own devices, children will subsist on pablum and never graduate to the great works. But taste in literature is similar to taste in food. As children, we turn up our noses at anything more exotic than cheeseburgers, despite our parents' best efforts to expand our palates. As we grow older, though, we find the same old thing boring, unsatisfying, so we decide to take a chance and order something a little out of the ordinary. Before you know it, we are making reservations at the new Ethiopian joint downtown, which turns out to be a mistake, but who cares? We tried it, didn't like it, and so move on to the next experience.

So, too, in literature. We start out reading "Spiderman" and Stephen King, and this leads us to "Watchmen" and Harlan Ellison, which in turn leads us to Vonnegut and Heller and Pynchon, until we're just snatching up random books at the sidewalk bargain bins (of which there are simply not enough outside of New York City). And, of course, we still enjoy the cheeseburgers of Stephen King--everyone's got to have comfort food, right?

A couple of choice quotes from today's Times article show you the out-of-touchness of those who question the "read-what-you-like" movement. First, from Diane Ravitch, arguably the most famous name in education policy: If given the option to choose their reading material, she says, "What child is going to pick up 'Moby-Dick'?"

Well, exactly, Dr. Ravitch. Although, in defense of Melville's masterpiece, we would like to say that the first 100 pages and the last 50 pages are one hell of a book. It's those middle 500 pages about penguins and blubber and ice that make you want to kill yourself.

And from Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University: "I actually used to be a real hard-line, great books, high-culture kind of person who would want to stick to Dickens." In describing his eventual, if perhaps grudging, acceptance of a more liberal approach to reading, Bauerlein continues: "I think if [kids] read a lot of Conan novels or Hardy Boys or Harry Potter or whatever, that's good."

We applaud your conversion, Prof. Bauerlein, but, um, "Conan novels"? "The Hardy Boys"? Is Emory Univerity located in the 1930's? Maybe your students should also make soapbox racers and get jobs selling the evening paper for a nickel. "Wuxtry, wuxtry! Read all about it!" We're just saying.

Oh, and by the way, we like Dickens. But not as much as we would have if we hadn't been forced to read David Copperfield.