Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil Page A
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dinner-party conversation. Despite this, children who read early are seen as mini-geniuses. We’re told that once we digest the classics we unlock the secrets of the universe, but there are days when I wish I’d learned to fix a boiler or basic electrics. Literature may be revered in high places, but most writers I’ve met are pretty useless at anything else. So we should be grateful there are intelligent children and adults out there for whom books don’t appeal and whose skills lie elsewhere.
It may be honest, but it is brutal, even when trying to sound cute. In the face of this rather representative treason, I conclude, unashamedly, on behalf of a reading revolution.
We must reposition literature in settings – such as workplaces, mental-health services, dementia care homes, looked-after children services – where its profound worth will be seen for what it really is: the holder of human value, human meaning, and, yes, even the secrets of the universe. The growth of materialism over the past 200 years, and the development of a sense of entitlement to happiness , has created the misapprehension that if you are not happy there must be something – medically, physically – wrong with you. Many ordinary people who don’t go to the GP for a diagnosis of depression are unhappy, ill at ease, at a loss, sad. This is what we used to call the human condition. But what people instinctively know, and science is beginning to understand, 3 is that what makes people happy, above all, is a network of supportive fellow creatures, a sense of purpose, challenge and meaningful occupation. Shared reading can provide all this. Get a few people together, pick up a good book and try it.
1 http://bestpractice.bmj.com
2
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
, Richard Layard (Penguin);
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
, Martin Seligman (Nicholas Brealey)
3 Seligman argues that well-being is a construct with five measurable elements: positive emotion; engagement; relationships; meaning; and achievement.
Jeanette Winterson
A Bed. A Book.
A Mountain.
I AM LYING in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s
The Living Mountain
. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate.
Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else.
There is no substitute for reading.
To go back to the book.
Nan Shepherd never married and never lived anywhere but her native Scotland in a village at the foot of the Cairngorms. She was well educated and well travelled but she always came home. She loved the Cairngorms. She wrote, ‘The mind cannot carry away all it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’
I am not a mountain climber or even a hill walker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it. A book is a door; on the other side is somewhere else.
I found myself wandering the mountain range in the company of Nan Shepherd. She is dead but that doesn’t make any difference. Her voice is as clear and fast-flowing as the streams she follows to their source, only to find that the source always points inwards, further. There is always further to go.
I like it that I can lie in bed and read a book about mountain climbing. There are two dominant modes of experience offered to us at present – actual (hence our appetite for reality TV, documentaries and ‘true-life’ drama) and virtual – the Web. Sometimes these come together as in the bizarre concept of Facebook: relationships without the relating.
Reading offers something else: an imaginative world.
I don’t want to confuse this with fantasy or escapism. For me, the imaginative world is the total world, not a world shredded and
It may be honest, but it is brutal, even when trying to sound cute. In the face of this rather representative treason, I conclude, unashamedly, on behalf of a reading revolution.
We must reposition literature in settings – such as workplaces, mental-health services, dementia care homes, looked-after children services – where its profound worth will be seen for what it really is: the holder of human value, human meaning, and, yes, even the secrets of the universe. The growth of materialism over the past 200 years, and the development of a sense of entitlement to happiness , has created the misapprehension that if you are not happy there must be something – medically, physically – wrong with you. Many ordinary people who don’t go to the GP for a diagnosis of depression are unhappy, ill at ease, at a loss, sad. This is what we used to call the human condition. But what people instinctively know, and science is beginning to understand, 3 is that what makes people happy, above all, is a network of supportive fellow creatures, a sense of purpose, challenge and meaningful occupation. Shared reading can provide all this. Get a few people together, pick up a good book and try it.
1 http://bestpractice.bmj.com
2
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
, Richard Layard (Penguin);
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
, Martin Seligman (Nicholas Brealey)
3 Seligman argues that well-being is a construct with five measurable elements: positive emotion; engagement; relationships; meaning; and achievement.
Jeanette Winterson
A Bed. A Book.
A Mountain.
I AM LYING in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s
The Living Mountain
. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate.
Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else.
There is no substitute for reading.
To go back to the book.
Nan Shepherd never married and never lived anywhere but her native Scotland in a village at the foot of the Cairngorms. She was well educated and well travelled but she always came home. She loved the Cairngorms. She wrote, ‘The mind cannot carry away all it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’
I am not a mountain climber or even a hill walker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it. A book is a door; on the other side is somewhere else.
I found myself wandering the mountain range in the company of Nan Shepherd. She is dead but that doesn’t make any difference. Her voice is as clear and fast-flowing as the streams she follows to their source, only to find that the source always points inwards, further. There is always further to go.
I like it that I can lie in bed and read a book about mountain climbing. There are two dominant modes of experience offered to us at present – actual (hence our appetite for reality TV, documentaries and ‘true-life’ drama) and virtual – the Web. Sometimes these come together as in the bizarre concept of Facebook: relationships without the relating.
Reading offers something else: an imaginative world.
I don’t want to confuse this with fantasy or escapism. For me, the imaginative world is the total world, not a world shredded and
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