Do I Need to Read Ben Coes Books in Order
I t'southward important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might exist biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to yous about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'k going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasance, is one of the most of import things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to empathize what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'chiliad an author, oft an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For virtually thirty years I accept been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things upwardly and writing them downward. Information technology is patently in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a honey of reading and places in which reading can occur.
So I'g biased every bit a writer. Only I am much, much more than biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.
And I'one thousand here giving this talk tonight, nether the auspices of the Reading Agency: a clemency whose mission is to requite 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 human activity of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I desire to talk about what reading does. What it's good for.
I was in one case in New York, and I listened to a talk about the edifice of individual prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to programme its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, fifteen years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of ten and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not i to one: yous tin't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.
And I call up some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very unproblematic. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it'south a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens side by side, to want to turn the page, the demand to keep going, even if it's difficult, considering someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to terminate … that'southward a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once y'all learn that, you lot're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. In that location were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the thought that we were living in a post-literate earth, in which the ability 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 world with words, and as the earth slips onto the web, we demand to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot commutation ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go then far.
The simplest way to brand sure that nosotros raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that ways, at its simplest, finding books that they savour, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't think at that place is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and once more information technology becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should exist stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was alleged a bad author, then was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It's tosh. Information technology's snobbery and information technology'south foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children similar and desire to read and seek out, considering every child is different. They can 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 commencement time the kid has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because yous experience they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you practise not like is a route to other books y'all may prefer. And not anybody has the same gustation as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-tedious books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll air current upwardly with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they savour reading will motion them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Likewise, do not do what this writer did when his 11-twelvemonth-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a re-create of Stephen King'southward Carrie, proverb if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read null but rubber stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you scout Tv or run into a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you 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 go to experience things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You larn that everyone else out there is a me, equally well. You're beingness someone else, and when you lot return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for assuasive usa to function as more than than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally of import for making your way in the world. And it's this:
The world doesn't have to be like this. Things tin can exist unlike.
I was in Communist china in 2007, at the showtime party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one indicate I took a top official bated and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It'due south unproblematic, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the U.s.a., to Apple tree, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future well-nigh themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you lot a different world. It tin accept y'all somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people tin modify and meliorate their worlds, leave them better, leave them unlike.
And while nosotros're on the bailiwick, I'd similar to say a few words nearly escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if information technology's a bad affair. As if "escapist" fiction is a inexpensive 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 world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an incommunicable state of affairs, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered yous a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is only that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives yous a place to get where y'all are in control, are with people you desire to exist with(and books are real places, make no mistake nearly that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can likewise give you knowledge near the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give y'all armour: real things you tin take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
Equally JRR Tolkien reminded us, the merely people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another fashion to destroy a child's dear of reading, of course, is to brand sure in that location are no books of whatever kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing upwards. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a minor, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way 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'due south' library I began on the adult books.
They were skilful librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery most annihilation I read. They but seemed to similar that there was this wide-eyed niggling boy who loved to read, and would talk to me nigh the books I was reading, they would detect me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me every bit another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect equally an eight-year-one-time.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, liberty of communication. They are about education (which is non a procedure that finishes the day we leave school or university), virtually entertainment, about making safety spaces, and most admission to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If yous perceive a library equally a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print be digitally. But that is to miss the indicate fundamentally.
I think it has to exercise with nature of information. Data has value, and the right data 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 ever worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were ever skilful for a meal and company. Data was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain information technology could charge for that service.
In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to ane driven past an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every ii days now the human race creates every bit much data as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That'south about v exobytes of data a mean solar day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, only finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually demand.
Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only 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 ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may non have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the fashion you discover out most jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that globe.
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: equally Douglas Adams in one case pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical volume is like a shark. Sharks are quondam: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason at that place are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Concrete books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at existence books, and at that place volition always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries take 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 it. That includes health information. And mental wellness information. Information technology'southward a community infinite. Information technology'southward a place of safe, a haven from the earth. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the time to come volition exist like is something we should be imagining now.
Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and electronic mail, a world of written data. Nosotros need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, embrace what they are reading, empathise nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the globe, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to shut libraries as an easy way to save coin, without realising that they are stealing from the time to come to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open up.
Co-ordinate to a recent study by the Organization for Economical Cooperation and Development, England is the "but land where the oldest historic period group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, later other factors, such every bit gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put information technology 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 sympathize it to solve problems. They can be more hands lied to and misled, volition be less able to alter the world in which they notice themselves, exist less employable. All of these things. And every bit a state, England will fall backside other developed nations because it volition lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the way that we communicate with the expressionless. The way that nosotros learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than nearly countries, tales that take long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
I recall we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will go, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – every bit readers, as writers, equally citizens – take obligations. I thought I'd effort and spell out some of these obligations hither.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in individual and in public places. If nosotros read for pleasure, if others see us reading, so we larn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a expert thing.
We accept an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then y'all practise not value data or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are dissentious the future.
We accept an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they savour. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to get in interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Apply reading-aloud time as bonding time, equally time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put bated.
Nosotros accept an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words hateful and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what nosotros mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend information technology is a dead matter that must be revered, but we should use it every bit a living matter, 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 true things, especially important when nosotros are creating tales of people who do non exist in places that never were – to sympathise that truth is not in what happens only what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, subsequently all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, merely to make them need to plow the pages. One of the all-time cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot end themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our brusk stay on this greenish globe, we have an obligation not to preach, non to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages downward our readers' throats similar adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we take an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write annihilation for children that we would not want to read ourselves.
We have an obligation to empathize and to admit that every bit writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it upwards and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own futurity and diminished theirs.
Nosotros all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We take an obligation to imagine. It is piece of cake to pretend that nobody tin change annihilation, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than cipher: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. Only the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they exercise it by imagining that things can be different.
Look around you lot: I mean information technology. Intermission, for a moment and expect around the room that you are in. I'm going to signal out something so obvious that information technology tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can meet, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it 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 correct now without usa all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this metropolis, exist considering, over and over and over, people imagined things.
We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, non to empty the oceans, not to go out our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed upward, shortchanged, and crippled.
Nosotros take an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of any party who exercise non empathize the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not desire to human activity to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of political party politics. This is a matter of mutual humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked one time how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If y'all desire them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope nosotros can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and sympathise.
Do I Need to Read Ben Coes Books in Order
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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