How reading changes the essence of a person

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Literature can show you a different world. She can take you where you have never been. Having visited other worlds once as those who have tasted magic fruits, you will never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up …

A gorgeous article by writer Neil Gaiman on the nature and benefits of reading. This is not just vague thinking, but a very clear and consistent proof of seemingly obvious things.

If you have mathematician friends who ask you why read fiction, give them this text. If you have friends who convince you that soon all books will be electronic, give them this text. If you fondly (or, on the contrary, with horror) recall going to the library, read this text. If your children are growing up, read this text with them, and if you are just thinking about what and how to read with children, even more so read this text.

It is important for people to explain which side they are on.… A kind of declaration of interests.

So I'm going to talk to you about reading and that reading fiction and reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person's life.

And I'm obviously very biased because I'm a writer, fiction writer. I write for both children and adults. For nearly 30 years now, I've been making my living with words, mostly creating and writing things. I am certainly interested in people reading, for people reading fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and to foster the love of reading and the existence of places to read. So I'm biased like Writer … But I'm much more biased like reader.

I was in New York one day and I heard a conversation about building private prisons, a booming industry in America. The prison industry must plan for its future growth - how many cells will they need? What will be the number of prisoners in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all this very easily, using the simplest algorithm based on surveys, what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds can't read … And, of course, she cannot read for her own pleasure.

There is no direct relationship in this, it cannot be said that there is no crime in an educated society. But the relationship between the factors is visible. I think the simplest of these connections comes from the obvious:

Literate people read fiction. Fiction has two purposes:

Firstly, it opens you up to a reading addiction. The desire to know what will happen next, the desire to turn the page, the need to continue, even if it is difficult, because someone is in trouble, and you have to find out how it will end … this is a real drive. It makes you learn new words, think differently, keep moving forward. Finding that reading is a pleasure in itself. Once you realize this, you are well on your way to continuous reading.

The easiest way to guarantee to raise literate children is to teach them to read and show that reading is enjoyable fun. The simplest thing is to find the books they like, give them access and let them read.

There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and are looking for their books, because every child is different. They find the stories they want, and they go inside those stories. A hackneyed hackneyed idea is not hackneyed and hackneyed for them. After all, the child discovers it for the first time for himself. Do not discourage children from reading just because you feel like they are reading the wrong things. Literature that you don't like is the way to books that you may like. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

AND second thingthat fiction does, it engenders empathy. When you watch a TV show or movie, you are looking at things that happen to other people. Fiction is something that you produce from 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create the world, inhabit it and look around with someone else's eyes. You begin to feel things, visit places and worlds that you would not even know about. You will learn that the outside world is you too. You become someone else, and when you return to your world, something in you will change a little.

Empathy is a toolwho brings people together and allows them to behave not like narcissistic loners.

You also find in books something that is vital to being in this world. And here it is: the world doesn't have to be that way. Everything can change.

In 2007, I was in China for the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point, I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, SF has been frowned upon for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese made great things if they were brought in schemes. But they did not improve anything and did not come up with it yourself … They did not invent … And so they sent a delegation to the United States, to Apple, Microsoft, Google, and asked the people who invented the future about themselves. And they found that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Literature can show you a different world. She can take you where you have never been. Having visited other worlds once, like those who have tasted magic fruits, you can never be completely satisfied with the world in which you grew up. Discontent is a good thing … Dissatisfied people can change and improve their worlds, make them better, make them different.

A surefire way to ruin a child's love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books nearby. And there are no places where children could read them. I'm lucky. Growing up, I had a great neighborhood library. I had parents who could be persuaded to drop me into the library on their way to work during the holidays.

Libraries are freedom … Freedom to read, freedom to communicate. It is education (which does not end the day we leave school or university), it’s leisure, it’s a refuge, and it’s access to information.

I think it's all about the nature of information. Information has a price, and correct information is priceless. Throughout human history, we have lived in a time of lack of information. Getting the information you need has always been important and always worth something. When to plant a crop, where to find things, maps, stories and stories - these are things that have always been valued at food and in companies. Information was valuable, and those who possessed or mined it could be rewarded.

In recent years, we have moved away from the lack of information and approached oversaturation with it. According to Google's Eric Schmidt, the human race now generates as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of our civilization to 2003. That's about five exobytes of information a day, if you're into numbers. Now the challenge is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help navigating to find what we really need among this information.

Books are a way to communicate with the dead … It is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Humanity created itself, developed, gave rise to a type of knowledge that can be developed, and not constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have survived the cultures and walls in which they were first told for a long time.

If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, culture, or wisdom. You drown out the voices of the past and harm the future.

We must read aloud to our children … Read to them what pleases them. Read them stories that we are already tired of. To speak in different voices, to interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned to do it. Making reading aloud a moment of togetherness, a time when no one is looking at their phones, when the temptations of the world are put aside.

We must use the language … Develop, learn what new words mean and how to use them, communicate clearly, say what we mean. We shouldn't try to freeze the tongue, pretend it's a dead thing to be honored. We must use language as a living thing that moves, that carries words, that allows their meanings and pronunciation to change over time.

Writers- especially children's writers - have obligations to readers … We must write truthful things, which is especially important when we compose stories about people who did not exist, or places we haven’t been, to understand that the truth is not what actually happened, but what tells us, who we are.

After all, literature is a true lie, among other things. We must not tire our readers, but make sure that they themselves want to turn the next page. One of the best tools for those who are reluctant to read is a story that they cannot tear themselves away from.

We must tell our readers the truth, arm them, give protection and convey the wisdom that we managed to learn from our short stay in this green world. We shouldn't preach, lecture, stuff ready-made truths into the throats of our readers, like birds that feed their chicks with pre-chewed worms. And we should never, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, write for children what we would not like to read ourselves.

We all - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream … We have to invent. It is easy to pretend that no one can change anything, that we live in a world where society is huge and the person is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain in a rice field. But the truth is that individuals change the world over and over again, individuals create the future, and they do so by imagining that things can be different.

Take a look around. I'm serious. Stop for a moment and look at the room you are in. I want to show something so obvious that everyone has already forgotten it. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls, was at some point invented. Someone decided that it would be much easier to sit on a chair than on the ground, and came up with a chair. Someone had to figure out a way so that I could speak to all of you in London right now, without getting wet. This room and all the things in it, all the things in the building, in this city exist because over and over again people come up with something.

We must make things beautiful … Not to make the world uglier than it was before us, not to devastate the oceans, not to pass our problems on to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children in the world that we have so stupidly ruined, robbed and disfigured.

Albert Einstein was once asked how we can make our children smarter? His answer was simple and wise. If you want your kids to be smart, he said, read them stories. If you want them to be even smarter, read them even more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading and imagination.

I hope that we will be able to pass on to our children a world where they will read and read to them, where they will imagine and understand.