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MWF '11 Coverage: Why I Read

Rebecca Harkins-Cross August 28

The experience of learning to read is one that I remember with strange clarity. When we lived in Cressy, a pinpoint inland town roughly an hour from Geelong, my parents bought me a subscription to a series of fairytales on tape to wile away the long drives to crèche. Every week I would receive a new cassette and accompanying picture book in the mail. Perched in the backseat of our beat-up Valiant, the twice-daily trips would fly by as four-year-old me, armed with a walkman my chubby fingers could barely operate and my Dad’s giant headphones that perpetually slipped off my ears, devoured tape after tape, story after story – the Little Match Girl, the Brave Tin Soldier, the Emperor’s New Clothes. I can still hear the sparkling chimes that alerted me to flip the page.

At the same time, my Dad began teaching me to read with flashcards, spending patient hours with me in my bedroom. (It is probably obvious by now that I am an only child.) And slowly but surely, the little ants that marched amidst the fairytales’ illustrations began to match up with the stories that I listened to over and over again, almost without my noticing.

Hosted by Antoni Jach, Why I Read asked authors Kate Grenville, Chris Womersley and Tess Gerritson to relay their own introductions to the written word, remembering the books that they encountered as children which instilled in them a love of reading – the books that bestowed upon them that wondrous and terrible addiction which could only be sated by writing their own.

Kate told a gorgeous story of sitting with her older brother on the linoleum floor, him trying to teach her how the word ‘Kooka’ on the stove equated with the accompanying picture. “That’s what’s wrong with the youth of today,” she joked. “They don’t have stoves with kookaburras on them!” It was the wonder of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree that did it for Chris, the strange worlds of Cole’s Funny Picture Book and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Tess, like myself, began by listening to Walt Disney records and following along with printed booklets. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, it not only instilled in her a love of words but taught her to read English while her parents were themselves still struggling.

But not only did these experiences solidify their love of reading, they also informed the way these authors understood the world. For Kate, who spent her childhood wanting to be a boy, it was Georgie in The Famous Five who taught her she was not alone. For Tess, Nancy Drew became a feminist role model. Here was a girl who wasn’t a nurse or a teacher – she was a detective, respected by the police department because she could always crack the case. Chris spoke beautifully of reading To Kill a Mockingbird on the precipice of adolescence, the book’s grey morality which he couldn’t quite grasp ushering him into a new world. Kate, too, felt this lack of understanding was key to her own growth as a reader but also a person – that it opened something in her, a kind of humility which made her accept that there were things in the world that she would one day understand.

This launched a discussion of why it is important to instil a love of reading in proceeding generations, and the ways in which we can teach children to appreciate books. Tess suggested that kids should learn that reading doesn’t have to be like brussels sprouts (“I should read this because it’s good for me”). Reading should, first and foremost, be like ice-cream. Some panellists expressed concerns that time kids now spend on the internet and particularly social media was sucking up that which once would’ve been allocated to reading. As Kate pointed out, however, this may simply highlight that the way kids are reading is changing. They may be consuming blogs or e-books, but they’re still reading and still having that crucial experience that reading engenders – that of inhabiting and understanding the other.

My own experience of learning to read instilled in me a love of the written word that I cannot shake, no matter how much I sometimes want to. They made we want to write, because it’s the only way I know how to make sense of what it means to exist in the world; the only way to comprehend those things I know and those things I don’t. Why I Read made me remember something that those who have made words their vocation sometimes lose sight of – that the experience of reading is, in its essence, a joy. Like ice-cream.


 

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