Read Like No One is Watching

Got a crosspost for you today. I was invited to contribute a mini-essay for the blog of the the "Everybody's Reading" festival in Leicester, UK. Given that Spellwright is now entering its *fourth* day on the UK's Top 100 Bestselling Kindle Books, I jumped at the chance to give something back to the isle across the ocean that gave us the Beatles and bangers & mash. You can check out the original post here. Also, if your anywhere near the midlands, checkout the festival and see about getting involved!

Read Like No One is Watching

Watch young children dance to music and you will notice that almost all of them do so to the beat. Maybe they're graceless or even clumsy, but they've got an intuition about music and movement. Watch a bunch of adults and…not so pretty. What gives? How did so many of us lose the beat? Probably no one knows, but I blame puberty. Somewhere in there, we started to care more about how we looked when dancing than about the dance itself. Like you, I have a two word reaction to this; the second word being "THAT!"

There's a famous, if slightly precious, line about 'dance like no one's watching.' I believe in that famous, if slightly precious, line. Passionately. I certainly wasn't dancing on beat until I stopped caring what others thought. And even if I am off beat now and then, I don't have to worry about anything getting between the music and me. I propose we apply the same idea to reading. I hear a lot of bellyaching these days about young people not reading enough or nobody reading enough or everyone reading only about wizards in boarding schools or bodice ripping romances or vampires who glitter in the moonlight. Forget that noise. Listen to any and every kind of music that makes you dance; pick up any and every kind of book that makes you read.

But I'm biased. I didn't learn to read until I was old enough to start dancing off beat. Why not? Mostly for the same reason that the words "dough," "bough," "enough," and let us not forget "hiccough" don't rhyme; which is to say, I'm severely dyslexic and my brain has issues with English's "loose" orthography. I wouldn't have this problem had I been born in Italy. There are one third as many dyslexics per capita in Italy as there are in English speaking countries. There are no spelling bees in Italy or most any country with a logical orthography for its language.

So I still wasn't reading fluently at thirteen, and all the adults had opinions about what a young man should and shouldn't be reading. The classroom classics were recommended, paperbacks with dragons and spaceships on the cover were definitely not.  Thing was, The Catcher in the Rye or Anne of Green Gables (great as they are in their own right) weren't inspiring me. It wasn't until I stopped caring what others thought of my reading that things began to change. I started sneaking science fiction and fantasy books into special ed study hall to surreptitiously read them under the desk; doing so made me—a few decades later—both a medical student and a novelist. I believe there are enough barriers to reading today that the last thing we need weighing upon us is the sensation that we might be judged for what we read. So I salute the Everyone's Reading festival and hope that this autumn everyone will be reading like no one is watching.