Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil Read Free Book Online

information need to be accumulated, through reading. We must absorb people’s histories, their ideas, their metaphysics, through reading. We must cram. We must buy a pile of books and read them, when the teacher wants, when the curriculum stipulates. We must read
Hamlet
before we’re ready for
Hamlet
. And Chaucer and Donne. We are given the impression that quantity is paramount . Better to have read the complete works of Shakespeare than just a couple of plays you liked. Better to have read Brontë and Austen and Thackeray and Dickens rather than just Brontë, or just Dickens. But when? These books are so long. Life is short. And there is Facebook. There is Twitter.
    We start to skip. Teacher has led us to believe that we are reading
Middlemarch
for information. For an exam. The same way we are reading
Principles of New Mathematics
for an exam. Or
European History 1815–1914
. Skipping is fine so long as we come away with the appropriate titbits; so long as we find a few significant phrases we can knowledgeably quote. Our multiple-choice exam asks: ‘Was
Lyrical Ballads
first published in: a) 1788, b) 1798, c) 1808, d) 1818?’ Damn! Who reads the copyright page? ‘Was Flimnap a character in: a)
The Dunciad
, b)
Gulliver’s Travels
, c)
Peter Grimes
, d)
The Castle of Otranto
?
    Hmmm.
    Our reading becomes frenetic, fragmented. We confuse geography books with travel literature, novels with history, and newspapers. All that matters is our ability to gut the material and regurgitate it. After a couple of years of this we discover that when it comes to literature you can save even more time reading CliffsNotes. Why didn’t we think of that before?
    When we read for pleasure, if we still do, it’s hard to shake the school reading habit, this dreadful acquisitiveness, this grim business of conquest and processing. Now we read for plot. We need to know what happens. And we’re more impatient than ever. TV soaps are so fast. We’ve downloaded the whole of
Friends
, the whole of
Scrubs
. Soaps can tell a great story and get a lot of laughs in just twenty minutes. Why does it take these boring old writers so long? Trying to read Philip Pullman we receive an average of three text messages a page. We stop to reply. It’s going to take for ever to finish this. But we have to read Pullman because everyone does. We need to boast that we have read Pullman. We read the books our peer group reads. Tolkien of course. Skip the songs, though. Skip the guff about Middle Earth. Skip to see if Gandalf is really dead. He can’t have killed Gandalf!
    And
Harry Potter
. Everyone reads
Harry Potter
. Can’t remember the name of the author. Who cares? It’s Harry that counts. What will happen to Harry when he grows up? Harry is our generation. Harry is us. What will happen to me? That’s what I need to know. Oh, but this
Deathly Hallows
is deathly dull compared to
Scrubs
! Actually, I’ve no idea who wrote that either, though for some unfathomable reason that’s more acceptable.
    And after the
Potter
cycle, what do I read next, if I can be bothered to read anything at all? What are my friends reading?
Twilight
. What is in fashion? Vampires. What book will tell me what I have to know? The next part of the story, my story, our story.
    Stop!
    Breathe, relax.
    Let’s have a rethink about the experience books can offer. Let’s try to figure out why we’re not really enjoying ourselves.
    A premise.
    If everything we see in the world around us has its word, its name, we can also invent words for things we can’t see. Make up a sound and imagine something it refers to: angel, soul, spirit, ghost, god. They exist, in words. In our heads. In our heads, with words, we can conjure anything.
    One of the words we invented was ‘self’.
    With the words we know, silently, in our heads, we create something, an entity, a fantasy, and we call it ‘self’, a creature with a past and a future, in much the same way that sentences and stories have a