Comments on: The lost pleasure of books

By: Julie

Julie — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:52:17 +0000

Interesting, Sara. I don’t think my response to movies & music has changed at all. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a movie, so no change there, and there are still albums that I can play over & over again — not just old stuff but new discoveries.

Lena wept at the ending of a book yesterday; I believe that was a first for her. The book was Afternoon of the Elves — certainly the most thematically “mature” book she’s ever read. She got over it though, by reading The Light Princess in a single sitting. Yes, it is a thrill to watch the little bookworm evolve…

By: Aunt Sara

Aunt Sara — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:04:35 +0000

Thought provoking thread. I don’t think the problem is jadedness, but more what you seemed to be getting at when you described “minds spinning with the events of the day.”

Any teacher will tell you that it’s the kids who are raised with love and stimulation and who are taken care of who tend to love reading. Someone has taken the time to introduce them to the magic of stories, and they have the time and safe cocoon in which to lose themselves in books.

Maybe we lose the reading magic when childhood ends and we have to earn a paycheck and pay bills and buy groceries and the other daily things. “In headache and in worry vaguely life leaks away,” Auden wrote.

If that were true, however, then happy rich people would continue to be ravished by books throughout their lives, wouldn’t they.

Maybe reading magic has to do with the growth of the human brain as reading skills are developed and then as the adolescent brain thickens. There may be some reading endorphins that taper off when the neural development plateaus.

Luckily, we can recapture some of the thrill by watching our nieces and nephews and students enjoy books! It didn’t quite ravish me, but I’d say that reading _Holes_, by Louis Sachar, with my students was a great literary thrill. They loved it and I got to explore brainstorms with them as we went along (Why an onion? Oh! Because is has layers, like life! And like stories!) Seeing Lena pick up the YA book I had been reading at Christmastime and begin to laugh out loud and read excerpts to Joey was also pretty fun. (And I guess she liked having that book passed along as a birthday present from Aunt Sara.)

I wonder whether you need to expand this topic to include discussion of movies and/or music. When I was young, there were songs that resonated with my soul and I could play them over and over without getting tired of them. Been awhile since I’ve had a song strike a chord in that way.

Sigh.

By: Julie

Julie — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:15:48 +0000

Kate — thank you for giving me a different perspective! You are absolutely right. Just because the experience of reading changes over time that doesn’t necessarily make it worse.

By: Kate S.

Kate S. — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:17:25 +0000

I don’t think that I’m jaded. But I carry more with me now when I enter a book which somehow means entering it less fully. I don’t become wholly a part of the world of the book the way I did when I read as kid. Like Adrienne, I read more analytically, but I think that I also more often choose books that demand to be read more analytically. And that’s not so much amatter of losing the pleasure of reading as having discovered a different kind of pleasure–at least when my analytic “reading like a writer” brain is picking apart the book to figure out what the writer did so well rather than so badly! When I do manage to recapture that lost-in-a-book pleasure of childhood though, it’s usually by reading very good children’s or YA books.

By: Julie

Julie — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:16:54 +0000

“It’s hard to get absolutely lost in a story if you’re picking apart the author’s skill and finding mistakes.”

Or if you’re planning to blog about it. :)