Do the Longmire Books Need to Be Read in Order
I t'south important for people to tell y'all what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A announcement of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you most reading. I'm going to tell you lot that libraries are important. I'thou going to advise that reading fiction, that reading for pleasance, is one of the most important things one tin can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to empathize what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, plainly and enormously: I'm an author, oft an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. Information technology is plainly in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and assist foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.
And so I'm biased as a writer. Simply I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.
And I'k here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Bureau: a charity whose mission is to requite everyone an equal chance in life by helping people get confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the human action of reading. Because, they tell u.s., everything changes when we read.
And it's that change, and that human action of reading that I'k here to talk about this evening. I want to talk almost what reading does. What it's skillful for.
I was in one case in New York, and I listened to a talk most the building of individual prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to program its hereafter growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on request what percentage of 10 and eleven-twelvemonth-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But in that location are very real correlations.
And I remember some of those correlations, the simplest, come up from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if information technology's hard, because someone's in trouble and you take to know how it's all going to terminate … that's a very existent drive. And information technology forces you to learn new words, to remember new thoughts, to keep going. To detect that reading per se is pleasurable. One time you acquire that, you lot're on the road to reading everything. And reading is cardinal. There were noises fabricated briefly, a few years agone, about the thought that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the power to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, simply those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the earth with words, and as the world slips onto the web, nosotros need to follow, to communicate and to encompass what we are reading. People who cannot empathise each other cannot commutation ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.
The simplest way to make certain that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they bask, giving them admission to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't think there is such a thing equally a bad book for children. Every at present and over again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, mayhap, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, and so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried every bit fostering illiteracy.
It'due south tosh. It'south snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and desire to read and seek out, considering every child is different. They can detect the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out thought isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the get-go time the kid has encountered it. Do non discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a road to other books you may adopt. And not everyone has the same sense of taste equally you.
Well-meaning adults tin can easily destroy a child'southward dearest of reading: finish them reading what they savour, or give them worthy-but-slow books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. Yous'll current of air up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We demand our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they savor reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Too, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and go a copy of Stephen Male monarch'due south Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll honey this! Holly read zero but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the residuum of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)
And the 2nd thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you lookout man TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something yous build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and yous, and you alone, using your imagination, create a globe and people it and wait out through other optics. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds y'all would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, besides. Yous're existence someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing the states to function as more than than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your manner in the earth. And it's this:
The earth doesn't accept to exist similar this. Things tin be unlike.
I was in Prc in 2007, at the starting time political party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It'due south uncomplicated, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did non imagine. And then they sent a delegation to the The states, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the futurity about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can prove you a different world. It can have you somewhere you've never been. Once yous've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, yous tin can never exist entirely content with the earth that yous grew up in. Discontent is a expert affair: discontented people tin modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, get out them different.
And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if information technology'due south a bad affair. Equally if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible state of affairs, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant y'all ill, and someone offered you lot a temporary escape, why wouldn't you accept information technology? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight exterior, gives you a place to go where you lot are in control, are with people y'all want to exist with(and books are real places, make no fault about that); and more than chiefly, during your escape, books can as well give y'all knowledge about the globe and your predicament, give you weapons, requite you lot armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the but people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to brand sure in that location are no books of any kind around. And to requite them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could exist persuaded to drop me off in the library on their style to work in summertime holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a minor, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children'southward' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They simply seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed niggling male child who loved to read, and would talk to me almost the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was non used to being treated with respect equally an eight-year-old.
But libraries are nearly freedom. Freedom to read, liberty of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about didactics (which is not a process that finishes the day we get out school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you lot perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which about, but not all, books in print exist digitally. Only that is to miss the indicate fundamentally.
I think it has to practice with nature of data. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we take lived in a fourth dimension of information scarcity, and having the needed information was e'er important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were ever good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable matter, and those who had information technology or could obtain information technology could accuse for that service.
In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven past an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every 2 days now the man race creates as much information equally we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's nigh five exobytes of data a 24-hour interval, for those of y'all keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. Nosotros are going to demand help navigating that data to observe the matter nosotros actually need.
Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are merely the tip of the information iceberg: they are in that location, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More than children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: newspaper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for instance, places that people, who may non accept computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the style you find out almost jobs, utilize for jobs or utilize for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that globe.
I do not believe that all books will or should drift onto screens: equally Douglas Adams one time pointed out to me, more than than 20 years earlier the Kindle turned up, a physical book is similar a shark. Sharks are old: in that location were sharks in the ocean earlier the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at beingness sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel expert in your paw: they are good at being books, and there will always exist a identify for them. They belong in libraries, just equally libraries accept already get places you can become to go access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every denizen equal access to information technology. That includes health data. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safe, a haven from the world. It'due south a identify with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will exist similar is something we should be imagining now.
Literacy is more than important than ever information technology was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who tin read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, sympathize dash, and make themselves understood.
Libraries really are the gates to the futurity. So information technology is unfortunate that, round the world, we detect local authorities seizing the opportunity to shut libraries every bit an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the futurity to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
According to a recent study by the System for Economic Cooperation and Evolution, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, afterwards other factors, such equally gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put information technology some other way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the globe, to empathize it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations considering it will lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the mode that we communicate with the dead. The manner that nosotros learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than near countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the earth they volition find themselves inhabiting. All of united states of america – as readers, equally writers, equally citizens – have obligations. I idea I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in individual and in public places. If nosotros read for pleasure, if others see usa reading, then nosotros learn, nosotros exercise our imaginations. Nosotros show others that reading is a practiced thing.
We take an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you practise not value libraries and so you exercise non value data or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the by and y'all are damaging the future.
We take an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they savour. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just considering they learn to read to themselves. Utilise reading-aloud time equally bonding time, as time when no phones are existence checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
We take an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to notice out what words hateful and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. Nosotros must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead affair that must be revered, but we should use information technology as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when nosotros are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens merely what information technology tells usa about who nosotros are. Fiction is the prevarication that tells the truth, after all. Nosotros have an obligation not to diameter our readers, simply to make them need to turn the pages. 1 of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot finish themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and laissez passer on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our brusk stay on this greenish globe, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages downward our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under whatever circumstances, to write annihilation for children that nosotros would non want to read ourselves.
We take an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important piece of work, because if we mess it up and write ho-hum books that turn children abroad from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and macerated theirs.
Nosotros all – adults and children, writers and readers – accept an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is piece of cake to pretend that nobody tin can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the private is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they practise it past imagining that things can be different.
Look around you: I hateful it. Suspension, for a moment and wait around the room that you lot are in. I'thousand going to point out something so obvious that it tends to exist forgotten. Information technology's this: that everything you tin can run across, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the basis and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without usa all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, be because, over and over and over, people imagined things.
Nosotros have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than nosotros found information technology, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our issues for the next generation. Nosotros have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not go out our children with a globe we've shortsightedly messed upward, shortchanged, and crippled.
Nosotros take an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of any political party who do not empathize the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to human activity to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a thing of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I promise nosotros can requite our children a world in which they volition read, and be read to, and imagine, and empathise.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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