Reading for the Fun of It

With school ending in May or June, students will no longer be required to read textbooks and other assigned sources. Unfortunately, too many students take a vacation from reading anything over the summer months.

That is why I’m happy that many libraries are offering summer reading programs. The benefits of this alternative kind of reading—choosing to read what interests the young person rather than what is assigned or required—are lifelong.

I make that claim based on experience. In my forty plus years of teaching, I saw a marked difference between college students who found reading pleasurable and those who found reading to be a chore.

Teaching in the humanities, where I assigned numerous books and articles, I witnessed firsthand how much a student’s enjoyment or frustration with reading is a predictor of academic success. Think of reading as similar to riding a bike or learning to swim. The more we ride a bike, the less we think about pedaling, balancing, watching for cars or pedestrians, and braking. The more we swim, the less we think about staying afloat, breathing, and linking our kicks with our strokes.

The same is true for students who find reading enjoyable and those who find it frustrating. Of course, I am not talking about students who have been diagnosed with legitimate reading difficulties. The majority of my students who found reading frustrating were no different from those who read for pleasure other than not having read for pleasure in childhood.

I have sympathy for students who struggle with reading. Like those who rarely ride a bike or swim, infrequent readers have to expend so much mental energy on the mechanics of reading—pronunciation, inflexion, word recognition, and sentence structure—that they find it almost impossible to relax and let books transport them into other worlds.

Young people raised on reading have so thoroughly internalized those same mechanics that they rarely think about them. When they open a book, they can enter immediately, through their imaginations, into the author’s world instead of thinking about reading.

Can a person who in childhood stared for hours at a computer screen or at a phone fall in love with reading later in life? I know enough people who became avid readers in adulthood that I have to offer a qualified “yes.” The first qualification is that later-in-life readers have to put aside the painful or embarrassing memories from school years when reading was a struggle.

The second qualification is that these same people have to warm up to reading for pleasure. I advise choosing a book that is about something the person cares about. A graphic novel or even a comic book is a better starting point than a heavy novel. Remember: reading for pleasure is never a punishment. Instead, we have to give books a chance to entertain and enchant us.

As summer is beginning, I encourage parents to check into library reading programs for their children. But bringing children to a library also offers parents the chance to pick up a book or two for themselves. Children will be more prone to view reading as a treat if they see their parents absorbed in a book.

Reading is the only way to discover the power that books have—to make us laugh out loud and make us cry. Books can do something else; they can change our lives.