Reading Rainbow

When I was grow­ing up, if you loved to read, you prob­a­bly had a rough time of it, socially speak­ing. I don’t know what it’s like for kids today but I don’t imag­ine it’s much dif­fer­ent. Granted, there are socially accept­able books now, even anointed ones, man­dated tomes that have some­how become a kind of social cur­rency them­selves. But out­side of the YA bub­ble formed by Harry Pot­ter and strained to burst­ing by Twi­light, if you’re young and prone to falling in love with books, my guess is that yours remains a soli­tary lifestyle.

photo credit: Ian Hay­hurst

Is the robust inte­rior life that makes it so easy to open a book and pitch head­long into its pages also the thing that makes it hard for me to relate to the things that are going on out­side my head? I may be socially func­tional now, but it was a slow-learned and hard-won skill. From the time I could read a nar­ra­tive until pretty late in high school I had a lot of trou­ble giv­ing a damn about any­thing that wasn’t hap­pen­ing in a book. I kept stacks of nov­els in my desk at school. I failed to notice when peo­ple spoke directly to me. When I learned to drive I had no idea how to nav­i­gate any­where in my very small home­town because as a pas­sen­ger my eyes had always been in a book rather than on the road.

There are few devout read­ers in my fam­ily, but they shine out in my mem­ory. My mother, of whom I’ve writ­ten before, is an incur­able sci-fi and fan­tasy addict. Her sister’s teenaged zeal and cre­ativ­ity were chan­neled into help­ing me learn to read and along the way learn to love words and the act of telling sto­ries. Their father in a rock­ing chair of an evening with an inex­haustible sup­ply of west­erns. My own father read­ing only the news­pa­per, but read­ing it all the way through every time it came. His mother read­ing let­ters aloud to his father, who for rea­sons I don’t recall could not read them himself.

photo credit: natalia & gabriel

Whether for util­ity or leisure, each of these acts was accom­pa­nied by a hush I nor­mally asso­ci­ated with church. Unlike the barely con­tained quiet of church (I could be a fid­gety child, and wasn’t the only one), the hush of read­ing was a still­ness, a thought­ful suc­cumb­ing to the images form­ing in the head of the reader. Some of these were inti­mate moments I’d have observed in any fam­ily, but I don’t know many who had so many role mod­els with such ded­i­ca­tion to read­ing as I did.

I can’t remem­ber any­one my own age who was enthu­si­as­tic about books. Read­ing is by nature a soli­tary act, but just as nat­ural for me was the impulse to share what I was read­ing, and my excited over­tures tended to fall on indif­fer­ent ears. I was a very shy child, and books were one of the few things I got excited enough about to try talk­ing with other kids. It was easy to jus­tify retreat­ing back into my imag­i­na­tion when they failed to rec­i­p­ro­cate. Even eas­ier when there was mock­ery involved.

The rea­son I kept try­ing, though, is because I did have pow­er­ful proof that some kids were as into books as I was. When I was 6 or 7 years old, Read­ing Rain­bow became a sta­ple in my house. LeVar Bur­ton became an enthu­si­as­tic tour guide through the world of books for legions of chil­dren, all of whom, like me, con­sid­ered them­selves part of his on-screen troupe. Even after I replaced other PBS fare with Thun­der­cats, Tiny Toon Adven­tures, and Ani­ma­ni­acs, I’d still sneak in a bit of Read­ing Rain­bow and revel in both the joy­ful explo­rations of word­scapes and the unabashed fun that was shown being had with books.

photo credit: nyki_m

That Read­ing Rain­bow has recently departed the air­waves isn’t a sur­prise. The gen­er­a­tions of poten­tial bene­fac­tors raised on the show prob­a­bly all found their way into low-paying careers like mine, unable to muster sus­tain­ing dona­tions for even so potent a sym­bol of both lit­er­acy and, now, nos­tal­gia. The ratio­nale behind the lack of grant fund­ing for the show–that it’s much more impor­tant to teach the mechan­ics of read­ing than it is to teach chil­dren to love to read–strikes me as short-sighted at best and a false dichotomy at worst.

What­ever the rea­sons behind Read­ing Rainbow’s can­cel­la­tion, the result is the same: there’s a kid some­where who loves to read so much he falls asleep still clutch­ing his books, and now rather than learn­ing to feel com­fort­able in the world as a book lover, he may instead with­draw from it fur­ther. I’ve got to find him before he’s gone. I’ve felt that lone­li­ness and am thank­ful to have escaped it. Now I need to do the same for those who don’t have the “lux­ury” of Read­ing Rainbow.