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.
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.
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.
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.
