What I do puzzles some people. Always has, even before I was doing it. All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading. Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.
I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading. I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense. But after a couple of months of slipping out of the actual, fenced-in playground and finding a spot behind the bushes fronting the stone wall of the church and sitting there till the bell with a book, a trio of “friends” found me and took my book away. You can imagine the game of keep-away that ensued, a game I never won. The teacher caught us—we were technically out of the playground, which was a no-no—and the issue was resolved, as far as I’m concerned, in their favor: I had to return to the general population. (This kind of thing happened all the time, every time I thought I’d found a way to avoid having to be Out There with the rest of them. Always the kids making it difficult for me ended up losing me my privilege. Taught me a lot about how power works in a bureaucracy.)
Anyway, I kept trying and found new places to hide and these same three kept rousting me out and taking my book away. Finally I found a place inside the school, up in a room above the stage in the gymnasium that no one else seemed to know about. They never found me there.
But my point is, they just didn’t get it. Even those who didn’t ridicule me about it tended to be baffled. What, you’re reading a book? For fun? (To be fair, right about age 13, several of the girls “got it” and for a brief time I was popular with them because I provided them with books they otherwise might never have gotten their hands on.)
So now I write. Most of the people I associate with now are either writers or readers. My “group” if you will includes almost no one who doesn’t read. But I don’t live under a rock so I do run into people from time to time who exhibit dismay at the very idea of writing fiction.
Well, The Guardian has an article which provides some ammunition against such dismay. Seems reading fiction promotes empathy. Interesting, that. In a country in which reading for pleasure is a minority indulgence, all you have to do is look around at the current political landscape and notice how much this may explain.
Of course, to those of us who’ve been reading since we were old enough to hold a book in our lap this is nothing new. It’s just nice to have it recognized.
(Although I must admit that my empathy for those assholes who tormented me in school has never been much more than formal or, shall we say, academic?)
