Once Again I Am Being Attacked for New Ideas
I t's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might exist biased. A announcement of members' interests, of a sort. And so, I am going to be talking to y'all about reading. I'm going to tell y'all that libraries are important. I'1000 going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is ane of the virtually important things one tin can do. I'one thousand going to brand an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, plain and enormously: I'thousand an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly past making things upwards and writing them down. It is obviously in my involvement for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and assistance foster a honey of reading and places in which reading tin can occur.
So I'k biased as a writer. Simply I am much, much more than biased as a reader. And I am even more than biased as a British denizen.
And I'm here giving this talk tonight, nether the auspices of the Reading Agency: a clemency whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the deed of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it's that change, and that human action of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it'south skillful for.
I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to programme its future growth – how many cells are they going to demand? How many prisoners are there going to exist, xv years from now? And they found they could predict it very hands, using a pretty unproblematic algorithm, based on request what percentage of x and xi-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. Merely at that place are very real correlations.
And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it'due south a gateway drug to reading. The bulldoze to know what happens next, to want to plough the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, considering someone'south in problem and you have to know how it'southward all going to end … that's a very real 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 learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is cardinal. At that place were noises made briefly, a few years ago, nigh the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the power to brand sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more of import than they ever were: we navigate the earth with words, and every bit the earth slips onto the spider web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs merely go so far.
The simplest way to make sure that we heighten literate children is to teach them to read, and to evidence them that reading is a pleasurable action. And that ways, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't think there is such a thing every bit a bad book for children. Every now and over again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children'southward books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be 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 have been decried equally fostering illiteracy.
Information technology's tosh. It'south snobbery and information technology'due south foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children similar and desire to read and seek out, because every child is different. They tin find 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 first time the child has encountered it. Do non discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the incorrect thing. Fiction you do non like is a route to other books yous may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste equally you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child'due south dearest of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-boring books that you lot like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. Yous'll wind 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 volition move them upwards, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his eleven-year-sometime daughter was into RL Stine, which is to get and get a copy of Stephen Male monarch's Carrie, saying if yous liked those you'll love this! Holly read zero but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Rex'due south proper noun is mentioned.)
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you sentinel TV or meet a motion-picture show, you lot are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something y'all build upwardly from 26 messages and a scattering of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You lot go to feel things, visit places and worlds yous would never otherwise know. You larn that everyone else out at that place is a me, too. Y'all're being someone else, and when yous return to your own globe, you lot're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing united states to function every bit more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it'southward this:
The world doesn't accept to exist similar this. Things tin can exist different.
I was in Communist china in 2007, at the kickoff 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 inverse?
It'southward simple, he told me. The Chinese were bright at making things if other people brought them the plans. Only they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did non imagine. And then they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the futurity most themselves. And they constitute that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can bear witness you lot a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once yous've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you tin can never be entirely content with the globe that y'all grew up in. Discontent is a good affair: discontented people tin modify and improve their worlds, go out them better, leave them unlike.
And while we're on the subject area, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if information technology's a bad thing. Every bit if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by 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 earth the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you lot ill, and someone offered you lot a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in command, are with people yous desire to be with(and books are real places, make no error about that); and more chiefly, during your escape, books can also requite you cognition most the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: existent things y'all tin take back into your prison. Skills and noesis and tools you lot can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the just people who inveigh confronting escape are jailers.
Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, 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 upward. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to driblet me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small-scale, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morn and working his fashion through the carte 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'south' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books existence read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery well-nigh anything I read. They just seemed to like that at that place was this wide-eyed petty boy who loved to read, and would talk to me almost the books I was reading, they would notice me other books in a series, they would aid. They treated me every bit another reader – null less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, liberty of communication. They are about education (which is non a process that finishes the day nosotros leave school or academy), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If y'all perceive a library every bit a shelf of books, information technology may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which near, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I think it has to exercise 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 information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and e'er worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Data was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.
In the terminal few years, we've moved from an information-deficient economy to one driven by an information glut. Co-ordinate to Eric Schmidt of Google, every ii days at present the homo race creates equally much data as nosotros did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That'due south about five exobytes of information a twenty-four hour period, for those of you keeping score. The claiming becomes, non finding that scarce constitute growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to notice the thing we actually demand.
Libraries are places that people become to for information. Books are just the tip of the data iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than always earlier – books of all kinds: paper and digital and sound. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not take computers, who may not accept internet connections, can go online without paying annihilation: hugely important when the way you detect out about jobs, apply for jobs or employ for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.
I do not believe that all books will or should drift onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than twenty years before the Kindle turned upwardly, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the sea before the dinosaurs. And the reason at that place are still sharks around is that sharks are ameliorate at being sharks than annihilation else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, experience proficient in your manus: they are practiced at being books, and there volition always be a identify for them. They belong in libraries, just equally libraries have already become places you can go to get admission to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to information technology. That includes wellness information. And mental wellness information. It'due south a community space. Information technology'south a place of condom, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future volition be like is something we should be imagining now.
Literacy is more of import than ever information technology was, in this world of text and email, a globe of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries actually are the gates to the hereafter. So it is unfortunate that, circular the globe, we observe local government seizing the opportunity to close libraries equally an piece of cake manner to salve money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are endmost the gates that should be open.
According to a recent study past the Arrangement for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, later on other factors, such equally gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve issues. They can be more easily lied to and misled, volition be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a state, England will fall behind other adult nations considering it volition lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the fashion that we communicate with the dead. The way that nosotros larn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made cognition incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than well-nigh countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were kickoff told.
I call back we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the globe they will discover themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, equally citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd effort and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe nosotros have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If nosotros read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We bear witness others that reading is a good thing.
We accept an obligation to back up libraries. To apply libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do non value information or civilisation or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the by and you lot are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they bask. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To practise the voices, to brand it interesting, and not to stop reading to them but because they larn to read to themselves. Utilise reading-aloud time every bit bonding fourth dimension, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the globe are put aside.
We have an obligation to use the linguistic communication. To push ourselves: to find out what words hateful and how to deploy them, to communicate conspicuously, to say what we hateful. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must exist revered, but 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 particularly writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it'due south the obligation to write truthful things, particularly important when we are creating tales of people who do non be in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens just what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the prevarication that tells the truth, subsequently all. We take an obligation not to diameter our readers, but to make them demand to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, afterwards all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and requite them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom nosotros have gleaned from our short stay on this green earth, we take an obligation non to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats similar developed birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that nosotros would not want to read ourselves.
We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that equally writers for children we are doing of import work, because if we mess it upwards and write dull books that plow children away from reading and from books, nosotros 've lessened our own future and macerated theirs.
Nosotros all – adults and children, writers and readers – take an obligation to daydream. Nosotros have an obligation to imagine. Information technology is easy to pretend that nobody can change annihilation, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the private is less than zero: an cantlet in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it past imagining that things can be different.
Look around y'all: I mean it. Interruption, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'thou going to indicate out something and so obvious that information technology tends to be forgotten. Information technology's this: that everything y'all 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 now without the states all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this metropolis, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.
We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the earth uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, non to leave our bug for the next generation. Nosotros have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a earth we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and bedridden.
We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who practice not empathise the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do non want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a affair of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked in one case how we could make our children intelligent. His respond was both elementary and wise. "If you desire your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you desire 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 understand.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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