This is not really about music though I will add some remarks along the way. Like many of you, my work is in education – thirty years and counting as an English teacher. In Australian schools we have a number of iterations of the subject and I teach Literature, General English and English Extension which includes a range of cultural and linguistic theory.
Of course, we are aware of the crisis of reading that has occupied educationalists and other fields for as along as I can remember. This brings me to my first question: was there ever a time when the perceived failure of students to read independently was not a preoccupation of the more well-read community including English teachers?
It is obvious that a key problem for young people is that solitary reading is for the most part not as exciting as the visceral thrill of skateboarding. It’s not as thrilling as the possibility of intimacy with that girl/boy down the road who is responding to your posts and messages and who is sharing tik-toks with you. It’s not as important as income from a part time job. etc. Most of us here had long periods where we opted for the connection with band, a singer, a song over the slightly more delayed gratification of Tess of the D’ubervilles ( capital D or no?). I choose this deliberately because I set myself the task of reading that by assigning three chapters a day in a fortnight – I succeeded and enjoyed the book a great deal and felt proud of my achievement. Failed to complete Moby Dick.
This is not a post about which books you succeeded at and failed or about the problem with kids these days. I am wanting your view about a few related issues. Were you once a keen reader and lost the appetite once the imposed solitary nature of childhood was gone? Did music or anything else supplant reading? Do you feel a sense of shame about your reading? Did you move from fiction to non-fiction?
Other questions – did your parents read to you and do you read to others – children, grandchildren, your partner? My father in law ( 88) still reads to his wife and each night they sit and he reads around three pages of mostly canonical and therefore familiar material.
Quite a few questions here – you can add some more if you want.
Non-Fiction reader – fiction reading was killed by O Level English Literature (although I can still fairly clearly recall Kes, An Inspector Calls, and The L Shaped Room).
But … for no real reason (other than time I suppose) the desire to sit and get lost in a book left me about a year ago.
Trying to get it back – some small successes – but Mojo is about all I really read now.
Agree reading is a fairly solitary “thing”, and maybe it is a world of distractions that gets in the way, but I can happily sit in my own company. So why can’t I read anymore?
Have a stack on the “must read” pile, and hoping a lazy summer holiday may get the bug back.
Never interested in the classics, the few I tried didn’t grab me so I left them alone. A bit like music really …some of the golden oldies I was kind of expected to like I didn’t do I left them alone too.
But give me a good crime thriller, decent music autobiography or James Holland historical war book and I very much look forward to bed time and a good 20-30 minute sesh. So, yes, still an avid reader and I can always find the time at the end of the day.
I’m a compulsive reader rather a lover of literature, despite an English degree and 15+ years in bookselling. I’m reasonably bright so waded through Moby Dick, Ulysses and so on, but I’m happy enough so long as I have something to read. Over the last couple of decades the balance has tipped much more in favour of non fiction.
The compulsion is an aspect of my strong introversion. I worked out early on as a kid that if you had your nose in a book at family gatherings and the like people would leave you alone. To an extent my phone/iPad perform the same function now, allowing me to isolate myself from my surroundings. I still feel very uneasy if I leave the house without a book in my pocket though. I don’t remember being read to, and certainly don’t read to others, but sharing in the moment isn’t the aim.
I used to read fiction for fun when I was at school. Then at university all my reading time was given over to work, and music took over – playing in bands, listening to it, reading about it sometimes. When I started reading properly again, it was mostly non-fiction – biographies, popular science, loads of music books, and a few detective novels. Oh, and repeated reading of LOTR, roughly once every two years.
Now I’ve retired and I live on my own – and I’ve started to rediscover some fiction writing, in amongst the endless music biographies and analysis. I’ve also been re-reading some books that I read at school: Sherlock Holmes, LOTR (again), Pride and Prejudice, Christmas Carol. Like Gatz, I’ve always got a book in my backpack these days, in case I stop for a coffee.
You asked about reading to other people. While my other half was ill, we used to listen to endless audiobooks together but I did read to her sometimes – Pride and Prejudice springs to mind, it was her favourite book.
(PS: Tess – small d, big U shurely?)
You’re correct, and that’s also a clever sideswipe at the dastardly Alec to boot!
d’Urbervilles – french grammar – I would say ‘of course’ but that would be pretentious.
Naturellement …
What excellent questions you ask,@everygoodboydeservesfruita.
Did music supplant my love of reading?
Not at all. I’m now in a very lively, entertaining, book circle here in Stockholm,.
Six ex-pat Brit males who love reading and then talking about books. The best thing that’s happened to me in years. And I met most of them because they shared my love of music.
Last week, my seriously dyslexic son, 22 years old, came home for the holidays from his adult education college in Arvika, and told me how much he enjoyed Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. I was over the moon about the fact that he was actually enjoying books.
Ooh, Neil Gaiman – now that could be problematic.
The allegations against Gaiman (which he denies) are serious, and I have to say pretty compelling. None of which detracts from the wisdom of this article on a theme related to the OP.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
Even if Gaiman turns out to be a thoroughly rotten egg, there’s nothing in any of his books that is untoward AFAIK.
Therefore, to my mind, the only justification for not reading his stuff would therefore be not wishing to support him financially.
As I’ve noted on here before, my enjoyment of reading was severely dented by the pretentious claptrap I endured over the 3 years of an English Literature degree. The first forays into literature at school were amongst the most memorable, and many of the books I learned to appreciate as part of O- and A-levels are still those I most cherish – Sense and Sensibility, Brighton Rock, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Romeo and Juliet, Le Grand Meaulnes amongst them. I have always been a slow reader – 40 pages an hour was the best I could manage in my younger days. Now that I’m retired and have all the time in the world to read, my attention span has become shorter and I am too easily distracted by other pleasures. I also find it harder to follow the thread of a lot of fiction, losing a sense of the plot, forgetting who characters are or just losing interest in what I am reading. I’m much less inclined to persevere than I was – plenty of other books, life’s too short etc. I’m also more likely to suddenly start thinking about putting the washing on, paying the gas bill or what Mrs B and I need in the weekly shop half way through a sentence of purple prose.
So I do read non-fiction a lot these days. I think that’s partly due to my interests broadening out as I’ve got older. When I was young a lot of non-fiction was written in a dense academic and literary style which often made it an impenetrable slog. I suspect this was largely elitism on the part of many writers around in the 40s, 50s and 60s whose works were held in high regard as the last word on the subject. Non-fiction is much more accessible to the general reader these days, and there is so much more of it that it’s easy to sift the wheat from the chaff. I love history, biography, science, natural history and of course anything music related.
I think the transition from fiction to non-fiction has a lot to do with losing the sense of wonder we all have when we are young. I found it much easier to get lost in a world created in my head by a good novel when I was 18 than I can these days. I’m also more likely to have several books on the go at the same time these days. I used to think reading had to be very structured and linear. It doesn’t.
My parents didn’t read to me, although my Dad read a lot himself, but I do remember a teacher at infant school who read to us every afternoon and encouraged us to join the Puffin Club. Those readings were definitely formative, as was watching Jackanory every day on the telly. Being read to can be one of the most enjoyably intimate experiences for adults as well as children.
Towards the end of last year I had the sobering realisation that I hadnt’ read a novel from cover to cover for at least 5 years and more likely ten. I was an avid reader in my teens , twenties and thirties generally getting through most books on the Booker short list along with classics like Hardy and Dickens. But now – nothing at all other than dipping into non-fiction now and again. I blame the iphone and my tendency to waste time doom-scrolling. Anyway I resolved to improve – and since September have managed about 12 novels of varying sorts from Jane Austin to Elmore Leonard. I deliberately have to set aside time and apply myself to reading. Im aiming for a book a month but currently trying to get through the 1000 odd pages of “The Brothers Karamazov” which is proving to be a bit of a slog. My next choice will be something lighter and shorter to keep up my average.
I’m a lapsed reader with audiobooks on my daily commute filling the gap. Reading books, like golf was an activity that I reluctantly gave up when I had kids. I’ve always read to them and at 6, 8 and 10 they all read morning, noon and night. Fiction, non fiction and comics. It actually interferes with meals, brushing teeth and bedtime. COVID was significant in accelerating their reading habits. I remember telling them that reading was a superpower that made the world open up. Our now 6 year old picked up so much from his sister’s home schooling that when he started primary school, he found it hard adapting. As he put it to me, when only 5, his classmates, many of whose parents do not have English as their first language, were reading “cat, sat and mat”, while he could read “enthusiasm”. He can read it and pretty much anything that’s put in front of him. Luckily he has a very understanding senior infants teacher but I reckon he’s a tricky kid to teach and I see trouble ahead.
Our eldest reads a lot of non-fiction and for some reason, medical orientated stuff, so we’re pretty sure she totally has educated herself about where babies come from and the gruesome process involved. In other ways she’s in no hurry to grow up.
I still read the Beano to all three of them every evening, having read to them since birth pretty much. It’s a part of our family routine that we all still value even though they don’t need me to read for them at all. I learnt to read through my mother reading the Dandy and Tootles the Taxi (Ladybird classic) to us on her lap so I wanted the same for my kids.
Our second produces really funny comic strips in the style of the Dogman books she loves and really seems to have a talent for it. I’m sure every parent thinks the same of their offspring.
Our kids are well known to all staff in our local library and love going there and if we’re ever in another town, we go to the library. They’re all linked here in Ireland so they can take out books wherever we are. My wife drives this much more than I do.
To sum up, I think my kids would choose reading over TV and computer games, much as they love them. They’re not traditional nerds either. They all have lots of other interests but reading is really up there.
Thanks, Bamber, and others for such thoughtful replies – keep ’em coming.
I’m an avid reader. I have been since childhood. My parents were both readers and I grew up in a house where books were part of the warp and weft of life. Both my parents used to read to me when I was very young and started the process of teaching me to read. I read on average around one hundred books a year, predominantly fiction but with a fair amount of non-fiction included. Titles both old and new, whatever takes my fancy as the days spool out. I read paper & ink, ebooks and I listen to audiobooks. It’s all grist to the mill. I’m currently engaged upon a couple of novels and listening to a third, I always read two or more titles at a time. Books, music and art have been and continue to be my bulwark against the world. Reading has got me through some tough times and continues to be a solace, an escape and a way of learning and understanding. Reading is now as it has always been a part of my daily existence.
Interesting that you can read two or three titles at a time @pencilsqueezer. That’s something I’ve never ever thought about. Always just one book on the go for me .
It’s a habit I’ve cultivated in the vain hope that it will help me to read the preposterous amount of books I buy. It doesn’t of course because I just keep on buying books.
Well, of course!
But if you’re reading 3 books, how on earth do you manage to follow each one?
In the days before streaming and binge watching it was normal to have a few different TV programmes you watched once a week without getting Morse confused with Cracker and so on.
One is green. One is blue and the third one has dots on.
Should have been on “Songs that never existed” thread…
I did an English Literature degree and now teach it for a living at tertiary level, so I try to keep up. I was in the last generation of “O” and “A” level students to be forced to read D.H. Lawrence and still cannot connect with him, but otherwise I enjoy a lot of the canon: poetry as well as fiction, although there are some embarrassing gaps. I feel I should read contemporary fiction and Booker Prize material more voraciously than I do, but there is really too much of it out there. Doom scrolling is also a curse that I need to overcome to survive the next 4 years: my 2025 resolution is to read more paperbacks.
Anecdotally, I sense that students are less interested in reading than before, and worry that “Young Adult Fiction” has unfortunately become an obstacle to teenagers trying something more profound.
On reading in general, Nicholas Carr’s ‘The Shallows’ is a meditation on the history and developments in reading from the introduction of books to that of the internet – from a concentration machine to a distraction machine and the effect that has on the neuroplasticity and function of the brain even at an epigenetic level. All of which is to say that reading books is better for brain function than scrolling online, though less immediately appealing.
Which may be why reading may seem (to me sometimes) like a chore, hard work. The internet gives immediate rewards or it is discarded for the next site/click. Reading a book is a focused activity, getting into the mindset of someone who may not think like I do, or who uses words or phrases that I am unfamiliar with. But once immersed, those reading muscles do like to be stretched.
Also, the rewards of reading are in immersing in ideas that sit far longer in the mind. And if I am reading different books, those ideas mix and merge and reproduce in strange and interesting ways. I try to help that along by taking copious notes as I go, transcribing the words literally, rather than paraphrasing, as quite often individual sentences completely and succinctly capture an idea – a building block for further engagement.
I grew up being read to and reading prodigiously from a young age, but fell away from classic literature once I’d discovered Hardy. Perfect goth material, particularly Jude the Obscure, practically my namesake, and the novel I failed to get into Oxford writing an essay on (delicious irony). But the tedious analytica required for Eng Lit courses put me off reading fiction completely – Brodie’s notes, compare and contrast extended essays and rote learning Hamlet quotes to spurt out in exams destroyed any wish to read ‘the canon’. It could all do one.
I still have favourite authors – Susan Hill, Maggie O’Farrell – for the pleasure of the female perspective in writing. But I am another naturally drawn to non-fiction – In my case, the ‘ideas’ shelf of Waterstones, looking always for the next book that explains complexities in an engaging narrative form. Positive and humane approaches to modern political, social and environmental challenges draw me in most.
I also love the serendipity of the bookshare cabinet on the public square outside our house. Mainly German text of course, the studenty/NGO vibe of the Bonn Altstadt has put some fantastic books on design and the history of the modern city my way, completely by chance. Just yesterday, on the way to work, I picked up ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’, the PD James crime sequel to Pride and Prejudice – very apposite as our family joined my Mum in watching the Colin Firth TV version over Christmas, and I have started reading the book to my daughters as a sporadic bedtime story.
Speaking of which, luckily our two daughters are also voracious readers, particularly with time limits on their tablets. The younger one is ploughing her way through the various iterations of ‘Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls’ – female pioneers through history described in one page. A great introduction to figures from Maya Angelou to Margaret Thatcher, Jane Goodall to Catherine the Great. The older one has recently finished the ‘Heartstopper’ series of teenage gay novels. Each to their own.
My kids have really enjoyed the Little People, Big Dreams books about real life historical and some contemporary people, mostly women. Their aunts have bought the books for them over the years. It has been really good for their general knowledge and through the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Zaha Hadid, Vivienne Westwood, Harriet Tubman, Simone de Beauvoir etc. they’re getting to know about racism, history, inequality and how the world is now. The Anne Frank book is the only one we have decided not to share with them. I don’t think they’re ready for the Holocaust. They’re very simplistic accounts of the featured persons and leave out details like how John Lennon was killed but they are interesting first steps into the real world.
I have seen those on display in bookshops in Bonn and the UK. Very good. We have a delightful independent small children’s bookshop in town that we diligently support, which has suitable displays in their large for all walking past into town. Recently there was a whole arrangement of children’s books on politics and social affairs – at their level and not talking down to them – at the time of the general election. A selection of those books were a part of it.
Being Germany, Anne Frank and other holocaust-related material is sensitively but firmly taught at the right age. My younger daughter spent a morning with fellow classmates polishing the brass ‘Stolpersteine‘ in the Altstadt streets and my older daughter too a trip to Amsterdam with her confirmation class to visit the Anne Frank museum.
Those books sound remarkable @Bamber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_People,_Big_Dreams
One author, Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara, and she’s written 50 books.
https://www.worldbookday.com/2018/09/qa-isabel-sanchez-vergara-creator-little-people-big-dreams-series/
She lives in Barcelona and the books were all originally written in Spanish.
https://littlepeoplebigdreams.com/about/
Sounds like really good news. The sort of books that the mighty men of MAGA would not want in school libraries.
i suspect Trump University does not have a single copy.
incidentally, i do really enjoy these stories of your kids, Bamber.
Not only is your daughter a gifted street musician, she is also a celebrity bookworm known to every librarian on the Emerald Isle. Good for her.
Thanks @kaisfatdad It’s nice of you to say that. I find the Little People, Big Dreams a bit hit and miss and not always because of the subject. Having said that, they’re nice to have around and are child friendly in the extreme.
I remember when I met a colleague when we were expecting our first and he said “pray you have a girl”. We work with almost exclusively male young offenders and he said that there’s nothing better to help switch off after a tough day than coming home to a world of fairies and make believe. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading quite a lot of their books over the years though the neverending stream of the very samey Rainbow Fairies series tested my patience. As I approach my 60th, this evening is occupied with helping with costumes for World Book Day in school tomorrow. I need to magic up a black beret at zero notice. If only there was a retired IRA man with a small head in the neighbourhood!
I need to magic up a black beret at zero notice. ….
I laughed out loud at that @Bamber. Parenthood is one never-ending series of challenges. It keeps us young at heart.
You don’t by any chance have any French neighbours? Or retired actors with a wildly bohemian wardrobe?
Berets of any colour are hard to find in 2025.
I know that feeling about reading aloud a series of books that tested my sanity. I became with the Beast Quest series!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_Quest
So formulaic that today they are probably now written by AI. But he loved them.
The books take place in a world called Avantia, and focus on a young boy named Tom and his friend Elenna as they attempt to restore peace to the land by stopping beasts from causing destruction.[6][7] Kathryn Flett, writing in London’s The Observer, has called the books “almost certainly a work of publishing (if not quite literary) genius…Narnia meets Pokémon via Potter.”[7] The books are among the most-borrowed from UK lending libraries.[8][9]
I did have a black beret until recently alas digging it out from the wardrobe I found it had been attacked by moths, I still have a raspberry beret though. Alas this is of no help to you.
How about using a leftover pancake from yesterday coloured with black felt tip? Probably not much help either.
Raspberry beret, you say? What kind is it?
Rainbow Fairies! We went through so many of those, beloved of my younger son courtesy of Kings Heath library. That Jack Frost, he’s so naughty. I see they are now up to 220 editions of Kirsty and Rachel’s adventures, and the barrel is being scraped with the Puppy Care Fairies.
The black beret issue was solved by cutting out and flattening the lining of an old lined woolly hat from my golf bag. It was then that she told me about the quite complicated design that I had to draw freehand on the front of a t-shirt in white. It actually turned out well. They’re all asleep now so it’s my chillout time tidying up the aftermath of their play and filling the dishwasher.
Good man.
For me, the book reading habit comes and goes in waves. The waves can be days or sometimes weeks in length, but the tide never recedes, the book reading always surges back; it’s a part of me. Whether I’m actively reading a book or not, I’m always reading something; magazines, newspapers, websites!
My mum frequently used to read to me when I was very young, and shortly thereafter family friends and relatives were encouraged to give books for birthday and Christmas presents. In my childhood the living room was filled with packed bookshelves, and reading became a place to escape almost every day. Before I was old enough to go to school, the television only showed a ‘test card’ image for most of the daytime hours and books were eagerly consumed instead to whisk me away to imagined worlds.
When I reached school age my local library ran what it called the Good Readers Circle, and local primary schools ran fortnightly visits to the City Library to take part. Each week we could borrow one or two books from the separate children’s library, and at the end of the fortnight we’d be questioned by a librarian about the books we’d chosen – from memory you answered twelve questions on each. Your points score was recorded in your little GRC members card, and at certain stages in your accumulation of these you’d get a reward – first a little shiny GRC badge, later a book token for enough money (5 Bob! Riches!) to buy a couple of paperbacks of your own, and finally a small leather shield with your name embossed upon it. I swiftly spent the book token but left the school, and the scheme, before gaining a shield. I still have my little metal GRC badge.
In my teens music became hugely important, but it just meant that I did a lot of reading in the living room, in an armchair, with my dad’s headphones clamped onto my head. The idea of feeling shame about reading had never occurred to me until you posed the question!
As for the fiction/non-fiction ask, I’m probably about fifty-fifty on that front. My current read (since Monday this week) is Khaled Husseini’s ‘And The Mountains Echoed’, and my previous read was James O’Brien’s ‘How They Broke Britain’. Before that I read ‘Typhoon’ by Wing Commander Mike Sutton, and before that was Sue Monk Kidd’s ‘Secret Life Of Bees’. Long term bubbling under is the Neapolitan Quartet. And so it goes on. Sometimes I want a yarn, sometimes I want a wonder.
My wife and I often read sitting side by side, and we’ll occasionally call out particular passages and read them across to each other; our book choices often overlap and inspire each other. We’ve never been huge television consumers – usually an hour or so around the evening meal time, and while my wife is a careful and limited Facebook scroller, I basically avoid all social media, so those distractions do not feature in our lives.
Avid reader, deeply sabotaged by emerging adhd caused by modern life, deteriorating eyesight due to chronic self abuse at a young age, work reading (there can be 1000 pages in a background file), and so much else to do. Now, just getting through the Times and doing usual internet and work reading eats up my reading attention. Blogs, too. But I still have thousands of books and refuse to downsize or get rid of any.
Pre internet, I read a lot, all the time. The nature of my work meant that I could read while working because I was often only there in case something went wrong and I got good at keeping one ear and half an eye on proceedings. I also often had an hour on the tube each way so more reading.
The habit waned as work changed but I’ve got back into the habit a bit more although I’m easily distracted but I’ve got half a dozen books in the TBR pile.
Can I give a plug to my son’s GF’s podcast? Two uni friends, mad on books. The first episode is an intro to how they met and bonded over their love of books and then it’s a book per episode. They’ve had some nice comments, including one from author David Nicholls, who wrote One Day, subject of episode 2. They’re a bit giggly to start but do settle down after a while. My daughter did the artwork, her first commission.
That’s great artwork. If I was still commissioning illustration I’d be asking for contact details. Best of luck to her!
I wasn’t interested in reading at all, though I can remember one of Richard Scarry’s What do People do all Day books did ignite something. Education is wasted on the young -or formal education- it’s a time for learning and growth but who cares what date Christopher Columbus discovered America?
In my teens I found ghost stories and more by chance than volition took English Lit, and used Edgar Allen Poe as my subject.
I read now, more than I ever did and I am trying to read more books; fiction and none fiction, instead of newspapers. I’m ashamed of the education I received in a bog standard Comp. Whether it was my lack of interest or teacher failings to capture my attention, who knows.
Art and literature saved my life. I think I can say that. Without it life would be so drab and humdrum. It’s in the head and imagination. Books, even if they depict terrible things, are better than reality, as is art and music. In a good book, there’s a mind behind it, thought and ideas that remind us of what humans can do that is them at their best.
In my family we were all book lovers. I went to the Westgate library in Oxford regularly as a youngster. All kinds of things opened my mind. I remember reading Francois Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock for example. That kind of thing is fascinating. How a brilliant creative person operates. Two great minds. I borrowed all the Bond novels. The sort of exciting page turners that get you into reading. Conan Doyle’s works also. I’m a bit sad when I’ve read everything an author has written but then you find another author to follow. Modern fiction and classics. I got drawn to Penguin Modern Classics and Picadors by the covers partly I think. Kafka and Beckett. It can be comforting to know someone shares your world view, however bleak. I’ve read a lot of art books as well. Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo are pretty remarkable. Abstract Expressionism and Northern Romantic Art – lots of fun. The Sublime and the ridiculous.
These days I read quite a lot of music books, as in pop music. Most recently the book about Mal Evans and The Beatles. A great book which shows there’s still something to mine from that well worked seam. I vary that with fiction mainly. Contemporary novels. Jonathan Franzen, David Mitchell (The Cloud Atlas guy), Haruki Marukami but I think these wells have run dry. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie still has much to offer though. Currently I am reading The God Of The Woods by Liz Moore. I use a Kindle. I don’t see that it matters if it’s digital or analogue. It’s text on a page that takes you somewhere. Peter Ackroyd’s History of England in six volumes is a good, accessible way in to all those events and dramas without being particularly dry or academic.
You’re absolutely right about Van Gogh’s letters to Theo they are wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed The God of the Woods, Liz Moore’s previous novel Long Bright River is also worth reading should you happen across it.
I used to read like no tomorrow, as a child, largely to compensate for the extreme boredom of the long school holidays. I had no friends or contemporaries in my town, as I boarded at a school that, only 30 miles away, could have ben in another country. I guess, after leaving home, the competing requirements of educational syllabus and recreational hedonism took their toll, but I continued to read avidly, especially on holidays.
I am not entirely sure when it slowly fizzled out, but it was as I always seemed to have something more pressing to do. Now I am retired, I desperately want to pick up the baton again, but am finding it hard to get back into the habit. With some shock I discover I am still reading the book I began in around November, as I suffer fits and bursts of activity between ts pages, then finding it unread for weeks at a time. It’s even a great book and enjoyable read. (Demon Copperhead, FWIW.)
I shall just keep trying. Having said that, my pile of yet to listen to CDs is still way taller than my yet to read books, so maybe it is to do with the same procrastinatory territory, where I feel I need to justify me time over sharing time with the wife and others.
I probably read 2 or 3 books a year these days. Many are music related. 30/40 years ago I was an avid reader of books, magazines and newspapers. My lifestyle has changed. I am reading all the time, but it’s stuff here or the BBC or Guardian website or some reddit forum etc. Always plan to read more books but I mostly fail. I recently re-read The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin having found it in a thrift store, that’s been it for this year so far.
My 18 year old daughter has read a lot of books in the past, not so much now, but she has said she will get back to it for pleasure. we’ll see. She has to read some stuff now for her English course at school.
My parents read to me and my sister when we were very young, and as we got a little older my dad – who was the regular reader of the two – would sometimes describe the books he was reading. On top of that I had one very good English teacher at school so I got into the habit early, and did a university degree in which literature was a significant element.
Always kept it up over the years – usually got a novel or sometimes a non-fiction book on the go – but found in recent years I don’t spend as much time on it. Simple reason is that there’s a point in the evening when we turn on TV as it’s something my wife and I can share simultaneously. I think if that wasn’t the case I would spend more time with my nose in a book. And should note that my wife reads many of the same books as me.
Never had kids so no opportunity to get a youngster into what I regard as a good habit.
I too come from a family of readers. Both my parents enjoyed a good book and my dad (skilled tradesman in the print industry) taught all 3 of us siblings (older sister, myself and younger brother) to read before we started at primary school. He saw it as giving us a head start.
I was a proper bookworm in my younger days. I would read anything and everything. Sitting at the dinner table I’d read the label on a sauce bottle. I’d often get told off for bringing a book, comic, newpaper or magazine to the table with me.
Post-school I much preferred fiction to non-fiction. I went through a particularly intense sci-fi phase but I never took to fantasy and still don’t bother much with it to this day. I avidly read music papers for a few years (MM then NME) but then grew tired of them around the turn of the ’80s.
These days I mostly read crime fiction but I no longer read as much of anything as before. I have a Kindle (currently on my second one) but I also read paperbacks and hardbacks.
I’ve been an obsessive reader since I cracked the code just as I turned four years old.
Coming from a family of big readers I don’t know if I had a choice, it’s probably in my DNA. Books were always laying around and the visit to the library was the highlight of the week for me and my mum. I read every kind of book from the very beginning – if it was in the house, I read it. Which made me gain insight into all kinds of adult topics as a child, but I found it absolutely fascinating.
But I did read everything and anything; in the same week I could read a classic, three picture books, an adventure book, a Desmond Bagley, the latest prize-winning contemporary novel, a bunch of Edgar Allan Poe short stories and a non fiction book about medicine; enjoying all of them in different ways. And I still read this way as an adult – I don’t understand people who only read one kind of litterature, or believes that adults shouldn’t read childrens books. Why cut yourself off from what could be wonderful reading experiences?
I think one of my main reasons for hating going to school was that it used up time I could have spent much better at home, reading. I also experienced the agony of being too far ahead of my classmates who needed to be taught to read, while I was given exercise books from higher grade classes and whizzing through them at a pace that clearly exasperated my first grade teacher (and me, because I found it humiliating and dull to be asked to read simplistic sentences and then prove that I’d understood them by colouring the house green, or similar nonsense). I also didn’t enjoy spending time with other kids, as I found them to be stupid and ignorant…from not yet having read all of those books, I suppose!
But I have no memories of a class ever being given the assignment to read a particular book, not even in the final grades – then again, at that point I pretty much kept away from school altogether, and I quit as fast as I was allowed, which in Sweden is after 9th grade.
When I wasn’t going to school I would either go to museums to look at art, go to the library, or stay at home in bed reading those books, so the high-pitched voices calling from school to tell my mum that I was probably in danger of getting into all kinds of trouble seemed equally silly to both of us.
Once I got a job – and the first couple of years I just barely got paid – the money I had left after paying for my part of food and rent went to buying albums and paperbacks. Both thankfully very cheap at the time! By then I’d developed my still reigning dislike of public libraries. Great invention, of course, but for me the agony of having to return a book I read and loved became torture. I would be very rich today if I had put all the money I spent on books in a bank account, but I feel very rich looking at my private library, living surrounded by so many brilliant stories and sentences. Worth every penny.
I probably spent an equal amount on music and books, and they didn’t compete in any sense because I’ve always been able to enjoy listening to music while reading – enhancing both experiences.
These last few (maybe four?) years I’ve finally done what I said I ought to do even as a child, but was too lazy to actually do; I keep reading journals where I write down my thoughts about every book I read (or reread) and give them a score out of ten. Nine full Paperblanks notebooks are on my shelf now, I wonder how many notebooks there would be had I actually done this from the time I first had that thought?
Instead I’ve started to write a short “literary memoir” in the form of an essay, where I try to remember, roughly in order, which books I read that had an impact on me in some way; from four years old onwards. Just a fun exercise to try to figure out what it was about me that clicked with those books in particular – and what it was about those books that made me into the person I am today.
These days, as I said I still read just about everything, but I suppose my most read kind of book would be contemporary literary fiction.
But I do love a good essay collection as well, and short story collections, fantasy of a certain kind, biographies (autobiographies as well, just not as much), horror, some history, some poetry, non-fiction about particular subjects, plays, books on literature, language and reading, classic crime (can’t stand contemporary crime novels), intellectual and cultural history, journalism, and yes; sometimes also funny picture books and childrens novels…OK – I guess I love it all!
Unfortunately neither albums (on CD now) nor books (hardback now, to be able to read them comfortably) are cheap anymore….
I for one would read that literary memoir, Locust!
Get cracking!
My house suggests that I am an avid reader, but I am absolutely crap at setting time aside to do it. I always have several books on the go, but it can take up to a year to complete one. I have piles of books waiting to be started. 95% non-fiction – architecture, landscape, geography, some history.
My school in Reading had quite a good library. There weren’t (m)any adult books on its shelves, though…
“Reading” and “reading” are a bit like “Polish” and “polish” with regard to their linguistic stuff.
When Roberto Manguel’s ‘A History of Reading’ was Waterstone’s book of the month friends who worked in the Reading branch had to put a sign in the window making the distinction clear.
Endless source of fun – from the excellent NME August Festival review heading ‘Oh, ’tis Reading’
to the ticket advert in local busses, sung to the Phil Collins/Bailey hit – it’s a Reading Rover – it’s your bus pass, please believe it…
The afternoons just flew by on the way down the Shinfield Road.
Number 20 Bus past the University, turning towards Earley. Or the 7 / 8 all the way along to Sunny Shinfield?
7,8 and 20 all sound familiar, but looking at the current bus map, there’s only one bus that goes down the Kendrick Road, and passing by Kendrick School, dropping off by the Butts centre, picking up by the station, and that’s the number 21. It’s quite possible bus routes have changed in the intervening 40 years.
The Emporium near Friar St, I’m sure, disappeared years ago.
I didn’t go to school in Reading, but I did go to university there. At the time I thought it was adulthood, but it was a lot like school with added pubs and bands.
I was miffed when the alumni magazine changed title from Reading Reading to – yawn – Connect.
Tis the expected level of dullness in this town.
When there’s the opportunity for a bit of punnery or wordplay, avoid it and go for the mundane
Reading from an early age certainly before I started school and read at every opportunity. At secondary school reading aloud in class was painful because I’d be several pages ahead and if I was called to read have to go back and have to guess where the person had reached, and then be accused of not paying attention.
I’d read walking back at night tilting the book to catch the light from the street lamps, a friend remembers me walking through town during the day and reading without bumping in to anyone or anything.
Visiting second hand bookshops and coming back with stacks of books, the pile of books on my chest of drawers falling on me during the night.
I’ve slowed down now but when working I’d wake during the night and unable to sleep I’d do several hours of reading which got me through a vast amount of books. My sleeping pattern is so much better now so I don’t read as much, though I try to do a couple of books a week.
My son is a voracious reader so he’s good at buying books he thinks I’ll like even if on occasion I’ve already read them and still own them.
Gosh where to start with a topic that has been a constant presence in my life for over fifty years. My parents had tons of more-or-less appropriate picture books. At school I was always pretty good at the reading lark, as bluntly in the middle of the Peak district after school there was not a lot to do in the winter except read – my parents had no telly. I can remember getting an extra card for the school library to allow me to borrow two books at once was a big deal aged about 8. Both parents were avid readers and until the last few years of his life I had chats with my dad about his favourite American authors: Don Delillo, Willa Cather, Roth and above all Richard Ford.
I do remember very distinctly a shift around 9/10 – going pretty straight from Puffins to the adult paperback section of the local library. Anything with a Chris Foss cover – EE Doc Smith, Alistair Maclean, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke – was devoured. At school I woke up to English around A-levels, but a lifelong disinclination to get into DH Lawrence was fostered by Sons In Lovers. Studying Emma has meant Jane Austen has passed me by, probably to my detriment. The poets: Chaucer, Donne and Keats again I’ve had no inclination to pick these up. I did history partly because to protect my love of fiction from studying it.
All the time at Uni I read modern novels, scouring the secondhand bookshops of Oxford of which there were many. Reading has been a lifetime passion, and I shouldn’t think there have been more than a handful of days in forty years I’ve not picked up a book. With the odd exception I’ve not read much non-fiction.
I did read less in my twenties and thirties than I do now, I worked hard (not that I don’t now) and when kids came along for a decade all adult cultural activity had to move over for family stuff. But over the last decade I’m probably reading as much as I ever have.
What shapes my reading now? Two book groups of friends (not organised by a library or anything) that meet roughly once a month: one where we read award-winning contemporary novels. Creation Lake? We thought it stank. Solar Bones. Absolutely loved it. The other one focuses on classics. We’ve just had a year of pre-1939 novels, who knew Miidddlemarch really was as good as everyone says. Now doing 1945-1980.
The Kindle has also transformed reading. A whole library in your pocket. A couple of years ago I left mine in the seat pocket of an Easyjet flight and was pretty upset until re-united with it. I used to post on this parish the 99p offers each month that interested me. I now limit myself to 3 99p purchases per month, which is roughly what I get through. Mrs Moles also likes the Kindle as we can turn the bedroom lights off, and I drop off to the grey-white glow of the paperwhite.
I joined netgalley a few years ago, and am now pushing 100 books read and reviewed. It is difficult when you start, as they want to see a track record of books reviewed to send you the best stuff, but have just finished the new Ben Okri for them. I’m very selective on authors I ask for, to minimise the chances of having to post a 2-star review.
The final addition to reading, after many years of resistance, is audiobooks, which adds about a dozen to my goodreads challenge each year. Only in the car or journeys, and the tone of the narrator is crucial. I gave up a Jonathan Lethem partly because the narrator’s tone irritated me so much. So that age-old question of going blind or deaf at least in the former case means reading, or listening, can continue.
I don’t buy many new books at all, and visits to Oxfam have been mainly about offloading my parents books to a good cause rather than acquiring more. We have had several threads recently on collections, and I am trying to downsize my books – looking each one in the eye and saying ‘Will I read you again?’ ‘No will I’ I had a substantial non-fiction library of work-related stuff, and have managed to let almost all that go.
Eldest son, who did English at Uni with a strong focus on medieval literature which they profess to love still, has recently I noticed started dipping into some sci-fi.
Youngest never willingly read fiction from when the books stopped having pictures (he loved the Rainbow Fairies), loved maps, charts and lists from an early age and now regularly sends us stuff from the FT and Economist. Clearly reads a huge amount, but all current affairs, economics etc. They’ll never be carting around boxes of Philip K Dick or JG Ballard, and maybe that’s no bad thing.
Well… thanks for such generous responses. I am interested in the theme that formal education posed/poses a threat to the active reader. That was not my experience when at school – I just started reading other things because I couldn’t contain my interest in them. I recall the thrill of finding Wilfred Mellors’ Darker Shade of Pale – a musicology on Dylan that was lost on me at the time. Certainly, it seemed that nearly anything was more interesting than the books we had to read; an instinctive reaction it seems. But I encountered The Grapes of Wrath through school and Catch 22.
I am not a successful re-reader. If I have to teach it then rereading is required. I had not read Fahrenheit 451 until I needed to teach it and now I think it is the most remarkable example of prescience – how did he know?
The nature of my personality and the responsibilities of life do not give me a great deal of time and so the audio book has proved to be the changer. I need a particular mode of relaxation to read undirected, simply found fiction. One summer years ago, I was in such a mode and discovered Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. That led to The Razor’s Edge, then to The Painted Veil and The Moon and Sixpence. Finally to Of Human Bondage which I enjoyed the least.
I teach some very very able readers; one of my students gifted me with a copy of Dante’s Inferno – I guess I’ll give it a shot. I’ve only read Great Expectations from Dickens’ ‘oeuvre’ – I liked it very much but as a child I was scarred by the accounts of 19th century education horror camps and as a result I avoid his remarkable depictions of hardship.
But I also teach some students who have no physical capacity to read. They have the intellectual capacity but cannot sustain it. I read to these boys, with them and they like me reading to them. If you have suggestions about what has created an interest in reading where there was not much then I would be very interested. I have a performative approach to reading and the students enjoy it but I am not sure that it ever leads to their own independent reading or to a richer understanding.
I could read before I started school thanks to my mum and have always been an avid reader. I’ve always got 2 or 3 books on the go, but usually they’re different genres eg a fiction, a music and a politics. I just finished “A legacy of spies” by John Le Carre and before that read “Karla’s Secret” which was written by his son. Together they neatly tie up “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor”. Excellent stuff.
I did English Lit A level and generally enjoyed it and much of what I studied I’ve come back to our built on (the rest of the Hardy canon for example). I read constantly as a teenager, mostly pulp westerns and James Bond, music stuff and the odd pretentious dip into poetry.
I think learning to read so early might have given me a misguided sense of my own cleverness – a certain cockiness which meant I didn’t take anything very seriously at school. It took years for me to decide that maybe I do need to make an effort after all.
Currently reading “White Jazz” by James Ellroy on Kindle which is brilliant as you can search for characters earlier in the book who pop up after 100 pages and you have no idea who they are.
Love that entire group of Ellroy novels, with a recurring cast of really crooked cops and highly-ambitious prosecutors, plus the dodgy politics and Hollywood shenanigans of the time.
Very engaging reads.
Yes he’s excellent, and American Tabloid is brilliant too though the other two in the series aren’t as good. AT merits a reread as it’s so dense you get new insights second time round. I know I’ll read it again eventually.
The L.A. Noir trilogy are pretty good.
Blood On The Moon, Because The Night and Suicide Hill.
Like you Twang, my mother was adamant that I could read and write fluently before I started school. I could, but it would have been much harder than with my older sister, who has always been MENSA- level (I remember being punished for lying because I mentioned my eight-year old sibling was reading Sherlock Holmes books). I was drawn to comics and Ladybird factual books (How It Works, Kings and Queens of England etc).
Middle school was fucking horrible, but I must have absorbed something because I have a rough knowledge of stuff like Wuthering Heights and Dickens as well as stuff big at the time like Douglas Adams and Sue Townsend. Did English for A Level with a ‘progressive’ teacher who ignored the syllabus and introduced us to The Handmaid’s Tale and Dennis Potter – good on him.
At art school I read tedious bohemian stuff until I wised up. Then bands took over and I read very little til I met my wife, who is a voracious reader. Our flat is full of books, 90% hers and mine mostly about music, film and humour. I have discovered Mick Herron’s writing, which is bang on my level – witty, well plotted but not pretentious. Four books on the nightstand including a mate’s novel which I did the cover for – while ok, it’s a long way from the Herron underneath it…