The Silken Tent My Letter to the World October 1999

According to yesterday's paper, today is the beginning of "Teen Read Week," an event sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association. As it happens, my teen is actually reading this week. She has a book report due soon, and she is dutifully navigating 30 pages (more or less) per day of Madeleine L'Engle's Ring of Bright Water.

(A "book report," you will note, is a type of essay written and read only in schools. As a piece of writing it has a structure prescribed by and often peculiar to the single individual likely to be reading it -- the teacher -- and it has less to do with the very magical interaction between text and reader than it does with providing evidence that the reader has fulfilled some arbitrary prescription to consume a given number of pages. But I digress.)

Lynn is not the voracious reader I was at her age. The information card her English teacher handed out asked her to note how many "hours per day" she reads "for pleasure." That amused her -- her reading for any purpose cannot be measured that way unless some exigency like this book report presents itself. Although she is curious and has a range of interests, she prefers to get her information through asking questions and surfing the net, which I suppose counts as reading, of a sort anyway.

It's not that I didn't try. I followed all the rules for growing a reader. Lynn was surrounded by books before she was born, carried as an infant into a pink flowered nursery that held a crib, a rocking chair placed beside a good lamp, and a bookcase already stocked with classics like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She could read new texts (not just remember what words went with what pictures in familiar books) before she had any formal instruction in reading, and her reading ability has always been several grade levels ahead of her chronological placement.

Nevertheless, since about fifth grade, she has been reading only material associated with school. She attacks those tasks with gusto and completes all her assignments on time. Last year for a "book report" she read Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther's 1949 memoir of his son's illness and death. She was deeply affected by it, and protested when she saw it in my "Give to Book Sale" box. She fished it out and installed it in a place of honor in her room -- right beside Goodnight Moon and her *NSync concert program. But this is not a kid who will beg to be driven to the library or spend a summer's afternoon, as I did, sitting beside the river reading Anna Karenina. (Or, I must confess, the night of Bishop McDevitt's Crusader's Ball my junior year reading Death Be Not Proud. I would rather have been at the ball.)

My only consolation in this regard is knowing that memory might be exaggerating and romanticizing the time I did spend with books in my early teens. I also understand that Lynn's life is full of the positive social interactions that were, for one reason or another, unavailable to me. I sought books in part to fill lonely hours and escape some unpleasant realities. Lynn has different needs in this regard, and different ways to meet them.

Even now I don't read as much as I thought I would. Although I am not working full time in a demanding job, I am not idle. I do very little that I do not want to do, yet the school and social and professional activities I do choose still make it difficult for me to engage in as solitary and time-consuming an activity as reading. Yet the benefits reading offers remain valuable to me, and I feel their lack.

The earliest incarnation of this journal had a page called "Reads" that shows up sometimes as an access failure in my usage logs. That means that people are occasionally reading that early essay (called "The Reading Life" and returned by some search engines as a hit for the phrase "big comfy couch") and expecting to see notes and comments on what I'm reading. I took the page down more than six months ago because maintaining it took time away from writing regular pieces like this. Maybe it's time to revisit that idea, if only to get myself back in the reading habit again.