Reading is not dead
Judging by the lack of entries on this blog (to say nothing of the absence of all readers), one might think that reading is no longer an activity practiced by people, but several conversations in the past week have shown that reading for pleasure is still important to people. Those people are even adults, they even are no longer in school, they even could choose to spend all of their time doing other things.
Two of the people who wanted to talk about the books they are reading are members of reading groups. One woman's group meets in member's homes. Generally speaking, the women find the group through their friendship with people who are already members. For this reason most have something in common with at least one other member, but as the group has grown larger contacts have spread further afield and viewpoints and tastes encompass wider differences.
My other friend joined a woman's reading group at her Unitarian Church. It's a very different reading group than you'd find at a more fundamentalist church; K tells me that most are political and philosophical liberals and are open-minded.
Both K and D have invited me to join their clubs, but I don't. I do love to read, but don't enjoy picking books apart looking for meanings that I've never been convinced aren't sometimes ascribed to authors who never intentionally planted them in their works. Besides that I'm a bit shy as are many faeries, ones who keep out of sight among the stacks particularly so.
My reading--and listening, for I've been listening to recorded books lately--is proscribed by my interests and not by consensus of a group, one more reason I haven't pushed myself to join the groups. Once I finished Moby Dick, a feat which nearly did me in!--I took on A Tale of Two Cities. That led to A Turn of the Screw, and listening to all three books of John Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga. I took a turn to the dark side with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and that cemented what I love about reading books as an adult that many people read for literature courses in high school and college.
It is lovely to be an adult and to read books for pleasure that were intended to be read for entertainment. It's sweet to be able to read them and to form opinions that do not have to conform to a teacher's lesson plan or a standardized study guide. I loved thinking that Victor Frankenstein was a whiner and a self-centered jerk and not worrying that I wasn't supposed to think that about him. I enjoy finishing a book as my enjoyment of it and curiosity about how it ends moves me forward instead of plowing through it desperate to finish it in time for the test.
I've also discovered that the woman who reads these books now has life experience that allows me to better understand how the characters in them are affected by things that happen to them. I am happy that I didn't get around to them when I would have looked at them from that small perspective I had many years ago.
That's made me curious about books I loved from back then and I am going to read some of them again. Will I still love To Kill a Mockingbird, as I did when I was twelve? How will Holden Caulfield hold up?
I can't imagine not loving Holden Caulfield. I just looked at A Catcher in the Rye and found this:
"What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
Holden still has it as far as I'm concerned. Heck, I'd even join a book club if he was in it.
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