Hi. My name is commonplacer and I like to read “silly” authors mindlessly

For the last few days I’ve taken time off from writing to read. Being one of those people who can’t relax without reading (we know us types – as children, we asked our parents to buy cereal which had more eye sugar on the back of the box than regular sugar inside), I’ve done a lot of relaxing by inhaling words and images. And this time, I was trying to heed to Diana Abu-Jaber’s – a writer I admire – advice to aspiring writers: “do everything you can to create a writing life for yourself. To me that means: read constantly and thoughtfully.”

I like that last part – read thoughtfully. Because I don’t. Because as a mindless reader, I’m the type who can literally pore over mundane flyers and old receipts if they were the only things around when my eyes needed to rest on semantic symbols. Thought is not always on active duty during these instances. I’ve become a reader who increasingly likes to read with as little thinking as possible whereas before I enjoyed Don Quixote. This downhill slide began when I moved on my own. The simple truth to it is that when my life got hectic, I reached for the most un-demanding reading materials possible – the Series of Unfortunate Events (but really, adults will get more of a kick out of these books than children – Daniel Handler is a witty writer), Harry Potter, the Shopaholic froth etc. Let’s just say for the last 3 years or so I’ve read a lot of children’s or “childish” literature.

Juxtapose my sad case devouring children’s lit with that of children themselves. Active engagement with the text is the current direction of Literacy Education. Reading thoughtfully is THE only way to read kids are told. But I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going overboard with the metacognition in this case. With the amount of things we’re asking children to do with books, I’m surprised if some of them escape the confines of “active text engagement” enough to become real readers. As teachers beam with pride, kids as young as 5 and 6 are comfortable discussing the books they read using terms like “synthesis” and “inference” and here’s the shocker, it’s with real understanding that they use these terms. Just this week my grade 2’s “inferred” so much from a fairly involved picture book called Fox that I was left reeling from it.

It’s the concern over ensuring authentic reading comprehension that is guiding this latest initiative and while I resoundingly cheer the premise behind it all – that children need to see that reading is making MEANING foremost, not merely decoding phonetically – I’m crossing my fingers that “making meaning” is not becoming another boring crayoned to-do on a list. What happened to presenting reading as FUN? Again, just this week, one of my grade 2’s dryly noted that Roald Dahl was quite a silly author who didn’t take things seriously enough. Yes, I was reeling from her this time. I’m sure her metacognition was on overdrive there for her to arrive at this “synthesis”. Though I’m a teacher, I’m glad I was spared the synthesis lessons as a kid – curling up with a good Dahl work was worth being deprived of the ability to precociously dissect literature with the air of an English major as an 8 year old.

Coming back to my attempts at become a more “serious” reader myself (actually, come to think of it, that silly Dahl might have been the un-making of me as a thoughtful reader), I’ve been seeking it quite conscientiously. I started with the names of Allah book by Shems Friedlander. Immensely doable as it consists of the 99 names of Allah plus some perhaps spurious accounts of how reciting the names a certain way can help one. Nice start for easy and soulful synthesis.

I’ve also begun Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb and In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. I hope I fare better with them than The Kite Runner or The Life of Pi both of which I could not get into. Give me another The God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry or the Language of Baklava by Abu-Jaber to read and I’ll be reeling from all the thoughtful thinking – this time not from a 7 year old, but from just plain ol’ me.