The Weight of Reading

I was talking to a coworker the other day who came into the break room and slammed down his copy of Go Down Moses by Faulkner. “I cannot get these kids to care. How can I engage them in the text when they don’t even know what they are reading?”

I picked up the book. Never a huge fan of Faulkner myself (except for his essays and his Pulitzer acceptance speech), I began to flip through it. “This book isn’t marked”, I said. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t even been skimmed through. The spine was in pristine condition; the pages were crisp; the price tag was still on the cover.

Somewhere we have managed to skip over the almighty and authoritative quality of loving the weight of a book. That immeasurable success and pride that comes with traveling to the last point of pagination that screams “A job well done” cannot be replicated. As a teacher, one of the first things I do when I give a new book to a child (as hippie as it sounds) is to bend it. Break it in. Smell it. Flip through it. Look at the names of the chapters. Read the last page. Make the book your property.

This sense of ownership is what we value with every piece of property we purchase, and more so when something is given as a gift to us. This... perfection of weighted importance, a commitment to the page, is something that has to be taught. No love of information or knowledge comes until you accept ownership of the information you receive.

I read everything. I read directions. I read emails. I read papers. I read blogs, book reviews, trashy magazines, and novels. I read mostly on the train. I read when I am waiting for my name to be called for some insane amount of red tape I have to sift through to get to whatever the next step is. I read when I wait for friends to meet me places. I read when I am bored. I read when I am sad, happy, lonely, confused, anxious, and overwhelmed.

By the time I get on the train, I have stared at technology most of the day. I have sent texts, waited for texts, emailed, returned phone calls, and sat through countless presentations. By the time I finally get to venture home, I have had someone or something else doing most of the thinking for me. When I read, I have the opportunity to escape from noise and actually use my brain (although it’s usually tired from working all day)… and it doesn’t feel like work at all.

For me, reading works my imagination. It forces me to think about what I enjoy or believe and why. Most importantly though, reading gives me something to give back to the universe. When I think about  all of the opinions and absolutes that I have stored in my mind over the years and had turned upside down by something I have read, I realize that I have yet to formulate an original idea. But the conversation of ideas, now that is true scholarship. To have a verbal exchange of ideas and findings with others is one of the greatest joys in this life… and it costs virtually nothing.

I think that one of the greatest compliments we can ever pay another human is to give them a book. It communicates to someone that you not only know them well enough to purchase something that they might enjoy, but it tells them that you think they have drive and intelligence. You see them as someone who will finish a task, who doesn’t give up when presented with other options that might provide more immediate gratification, and as someone who needs to learn on a regular basis. In my mind and in a perfect world it also says, "Someday I want to talk to you about this." and just like that, there is a dangling conversation to be had between you and this other person whom you value. That is what I want my students to understand when I hand them a new book. This is the begining of a conversation I want to have with you about something important, because you are important to me.         

Our students may never love Go Down Moses (I don’t), and we’re going to have to be okay with that. There isn’t any reason why they should or why we should try and make them. My bigger concern and my biggest hope for my students is that they love any book. I am convinced that if they can manage to own a book and commit to knowing the information and characters inside, starting with the shape and weight and pages of a book, we might make lifelong learners out of them after all.