Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

by Shannon Reed

One creature looked like the result of a pig and a sheep getting a little too friendly, if you know what I mean.

Dear god.

Please try to recite even one E-I-E-I-O without rhythm. Go as slowly as you like. I’ll wait while you lose your mind.

We had books with ducks, cows, and dogs, all identifiably not mutant.

But it was too late. Someone, probably Tyler, because it was almost always Tyler, said, “Let’s read Old MacDonald Had a Farm!”

You probably do not work—surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be connected to the pantlessness—but if you do have an occupation, you are either a teacher, a maid, or the driver of a large and complicated vehicle.

You either speak for the trees, or you are an increasingly abused tree who probably needs someone to speak up for it.

If you were born before 1970, there’s a very strong chance that someone reading about you will get to a certain sentence or picture and say, “Oh, dear, that hasn’t aged well,” and close your book. Forever.

But Miss K did begin Wilson Rawls’s 1961 classic Where the Red Fern Grows. It’s about (and told in the adult voice of) Billy, a boy in the Ozarks who buys two hunting dogs.

I should pause the story here and mention that I am a crier. I cry at expected times, when other, normal, people cry, at funerals and weddings and when athletes win Olympic medals after overcoming tremendous odds. But I also cry whenever someone else cries, a Pavlovian response.1 There’s more: I cry at mawkish television commercials, awards-show speeches, Bruce Springsteen songs (even the rousing ones like “Glory Days”), and standing ovations. Pretty trees.

I cry at the same movies every time I watch them, but a little bit earlier each time, which means that when I view a film like Field of Dreams, I pretty much start weeping when the opening credits roll and don’t stop until the ending ones begin.

What I most remember about Miss K’s reading of Where the Red Fern Grows is when, after many weeks of buildup, she finally got to the climax of the novel. I very much expected everything to work out just fine, despite gobs of foreshadowing dripping off the plot.

Little Ann dies of grief a few paragraphs later, and then Billy grows up and moves away and never goes back to see the red fern growing between their graves again.

If anything, I probably needed to learn that It’s Okay to Stoically Hold It Together Every Once in a While.

Books are sly and can crack us open. They make us bring ourselves to the story.

The collective catharsis a sad book can bring doesn’t require that it be read aloud.

I have a soft spot for kids who’d rather read than pay attention to grammar lessons,

Me.

At the end, together, we’ve walked in another person’s shoes (and cried in their hankies) and are better off for it—but we return to our own daily existence, somehow a little lighter, a fun-size chocolate bar in our pocket, a life to still be lived.

I was not one of the children who needed to be coaxed. I read, a lot, already: in the bathroom, in the car, in the dentist’s chair, waiting for my dad to pick me and my cello up, at my brother’s soccer games, and while theoretically helping my mom with dinner.

I read during my math classes at school, when I definitely should have been listening.

I went for it with my whole heart, determined to earn at least one free pizza coupon a marking period. And thus, I learned the art of reading without actually understanding what I’d read.

I taught myself to “read” this way, in a mad quest to earn pizzas and not have to go to the Jolly Roger, one of my father’s favorite restaurants, which specialized in Cuisine and Decor for the Aged and had the kind of chicken strips I didn’t like.

No one intervened. If anything, my method was encouraged. Almost every adult I encountered thought it was great that I read so much, and I continued to get high marks on my papers and tests in English, so bully for me, it seemed.

It never occurred to me that slowing down might help me comprehend them, most likely because I resented having to read them at all.

What followed wasn’t exactly a long, dark night of the soul but more of a thoughtful amble of the midafternoon.

The best technique I came up with was to ask myself as I came to the end of each page if I remembered what I had just read. Not every detail, of course, but perhaps what century the book was set in? If the main characters were aliens or not?

Important questions

I’m a good reader, y’all, but I am an excellent skimmer.

High-school students hope you miss some of their typos and nearing-deadline gibberish as you read their words, but college creative writing students do not like it if your critique of their story fails to grasp its basic premise because you skimmed it. They want your complete attention on their work, and they will absolutely tell you if they feel they haven’t received it.

I would give anything to be back at the Jolly Roger with my dad, bored and sneaking peeks at the book in my lap.

Reading is no longer a race that I might win, but a lifelong companion, a dear friend who’s always there for me but never, ever asks for a slice.

Books don’t have main points, or at least this kind of book doesn’t.

Yet this way of thinking about literature, of distilling it, really, burning away all its character and wit and context and mood to a short phrase that very often insinuates that the author wrote with some lesson or moral to impart, is so often on tests that students have come to understand finding the main idea as the proper way to think about literature.

There are other, much more vital skills that can be learned through reading, even for those who have no intention of writing a word more than they have to: empathy, the play of language on the ear, the way words can change one’s thinking, the gifts of imagination to our weary minds.

The supposedly correct answer to the question from the answer key I was given is lost to the winds of time, but it was something along the lines of Bad things happen, but people are still good, which... yes, sure, that is a main point of The Diary of a Young Girl, but also of the film The Hangover.

I marked the snogging answers wrong; there was no right answer, but, somehow, there was a wrong answer.

But, as is too often the case in an American high-school English class, students took a flawed test, which they sensed to be an attempt to measure unmeasurable qualities, got a few wrong, and decided that the flaw was with them, not the assignment. Or the teacher. Or those endless standardized tests. They decided, in short, that they were bad readers who couldn’t understand books.

students who were perfectly good readers, and who might have enjoyed a lot of the assigned literature, did not like reading well-written books because of how their reading was evaluated.

Even at the advanced age of thirty, I was plowing through books at the rate of several a week.

"advanced age".

When I was a high schooler, I remembered, the prospect of a class discussion had motivated me to read when I was less than excited about the book. I wanted to share my thoughts but also hear what others got out of the reading, too. That made literature come alive for me, and I genuinely understood it better after the discussions.

Me in college.

Students at that age are thinking about what kind of adults they might be, and the idea of choosing to be a brave person sounded interesting.

I didn’t know that you should never, ever give students a yes/no question to discuss or write about, if you can avoid it. Such a setup asks them to choose one of two roads. In this case, one is a paved highway that leads to approval and praise, and the other is a rambling, potholed dead end of admitting that you’re human.

Books do have a main point after all, but it changes for each reader, and for each group of people puzzling their way to it.

This was particularly true about books and reading, because even in my youth, I already sort of thought of myself as writer, and I believed that in order to demonstrate what an excellent writer I was, I automatically should be very good at all book-adjacent things. To make a mistake about literature meant that I was not going to be a writer.

Intense.

His smile faded into confusion because, dear reader, it turns out that The Great Gatsby is not about a circus magician in the 1920s as I thought.

When I was a library page, a patron returned The Catcher in the Rye in a huff, saying that there wasn’t enough baseball for his taste.2 A friend of mine thought that the whale’s name was Ishmael.

If you have read The Great Gatsby, you must be shaking your head ruefully at younger me, for the book is both quite short and highly readable.

Who doesn’t have time for some tragic rich people and their absolutely ghastly parties?

Fear curdles and ruins when we let it drive our reading choices. We build up an expectation for a book before reading it, and then, when it turns out to be something different than what we anticipated, we take it as proof that we don’t know what we’re doing, and our reading is wrecked.

Someone makes us feel badly for having not read Their Eyes Were Watching God, so instead of just reading that book (or shrugging and saying we’ll get around to it6), we decide not to talk about books with anyone, ever again.

That's A hard book to get into.

Every time we crack open a cover and turn to the first page, we are taking a risk that we are not going to get it, a hefty blow to our sense of self.

Another truth: it’s highly empowering to read the book we thought we would never get.