The Joy of Reading

Our granddaughter, approaching three, sits on the kitchen floor and turns pages of the Joy of Cooking as she “reads” Dr. Seuss books out loud. She can repeat those magical word-rhymes and luscious alliterations all by heart, and she knows those squiggle-marks on the page mean something. So why not connect them, proving once again that all children are linguistic geniuses.

I can’t remember exactly when I cracked that code. I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.

“We were never born to read.” That’s how Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts childhood development professor, begins her book with the unlikely title: Proust and the Squid. It is, as her subtitle states, the story of science and the reading brain.  The title comes from the reading insights we gain from Proust (reading as a kind of intellectual sanctuary) and the squid (reading by making neuron connections).

We were never born to read; we were born to tell stories and keep oral histories going. Reading came late in our human development and “folks in the know” at various times said—don’t do it! It will destroy your memory. Socrates didn’t write because he believed books could short-circuit the work of critical understanding. In India during the 5^th century BCE Sanskrit scholars decried the written language (as did the Druids in another part of the world) because they thought oral traditions made for intellectual and spiritual growth.  But I tend to agree more with Menander who said, “Those who can read see twice as well.”

Now that everybody (but me it seems) twitters, we find ourselves substituting our rich written language for one that’s more tweety and syllable and icon-ripe. Why, after all, shouldn’t we spell “wine”  Yn? 

It seems a waste, though, to use only 144 characters when we all know so many more.

If we are using more than one written language, it's not the first time. The Sumerians, for instance, had a dialect called “fine tongue” which women used, as opposed to “the princely tongue” used by everyone. Kids spent long years in "tablet school" learning to read and write both. One old Chinese writing system used only by women was based on phonetic translations of word sounds and was called “female writing.” The Japanese have their kana syllabary used especially for foreign words, names of cities, people and newer words along with the their older Chinese-influenced logographic script called kanji.

Our granddaughter continues to separate out cat and kitty and meow and Riley, the cat’s name, and one day soon Josie's fertile brain will have figured out how to read in milliseconds all those words she's stuffing into her ever-expanding cranial word-cupboard. And, like Proust, she’ll then have access to untold realities she'll discover between the covers of books.

Comments

[Ren]

I remember complaining to my mom, before kindergarten, that I just knew I'd never be able to read. Books and words were so amazing, fascinating, mysterious--a secret coded language that I desperately wanted to receive, but somehow thought was never possible. Likewise, I remember the joy of announcing that I could read AND understand my first two-syllable word. "Something." Now, that's something. :-)