Read to Read
Today is International Literacy Day, and also Tolstoy’s birthday (he’s the old guy that is popping up on your google browser home page). I first “met” Tolstoy when I was in matric. He helped me through my final exams by giving me a parallel universe to escape to, filled with people and events that I was not at all responsible for. What a relief!
People read for all sorts of reasons. Fun, relaxation and finding out new things rate as some of the more positive experiences. Reading for pleasure means you get to choose what you are reading because you are interested in it. You also get to choose where and when you read it. No one is making you. Some say reading is a form of play but I like what Pullman (2004) has to say: “Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book… It isn’t like a lecture: it’s like a conversation. There’s a back and forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. And we are active about the process… We can skim or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages, we can read it in the order it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please, we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it, we can put the book down and… we can assent or we can disagree.” Read more
