How Do We Engage in Reading?

 

When I think of books it brings me a warm feeling only comparable to home. I grew up being a bookworm with only a few friends and plenty of free time. I picked my readings from a not-very-big shelf at home and read them a few times before I called for help. I needed more. My mum gave me a library card and a monthly subscription to a bookstore where you could choose and buy a book of your liking. That way J.K. Rowling, Elvira Lindo or Juan Muñoz Martín become and will always be part of my life. My book selection process was as messy as my young mind, but I found something interesting in all of the titles I selected. Some books took me a long time to read and I must admit, there were cases in which I struggled to finish them, but others, most of them actually, were such a short time in my hands that I re-read them to give a proper goodbye. My grandma ignited in me my love for written words. She told me a story every night and when she ran out of adventures, she gave me a book and I read for her, for both of us, since she could barely read. All the stories, all the adventures, villains and treasures, dragons and monsters, witches, ogres…everything I read, everything I will read isn’t comparable to her stories. Reading was an extension of my love for my grandma and my most intrinsic motivation to become a teacher. (Pics,2&4)

My favourite reading format is paper since I enjoy the smell and the touch of it. In this changing and challenging world in which screens are overused, I find pleasure in highlighting, folding, and making notes close to my favourite parts of a Shakespearian play or poem, a detective novel or even an easy romance always in their original language if possible. But, more than anything else, I enjoy the ritualistic part of what reading means to me. It has to be at night, to empty my mind, to rest and I truly think that it helps me sleep better and have the most extraordinary dreams (at least sometimes, most times I dream I am still in class). When I asked students which book format they preferred when reading most of them told me that they do not read at all. A small percentage of them told me that they read online and only one or two of my class were in favour of paper books. They do not understand how people love reading since they find reading tasks tedious and difficult. Magic, football and love stories are the protagonists of the books that the people in class who read tend to pick. Thinking a little about that I discovered that readers haven’t changed and that teenagers nowadays like the same things I did when I was their age, sadly, what has changed, and much, is the number of readers. Maybe if they could pick the topic of the books, they would find reading time in class enjoyable. The problem is, how do we select a topic with which twenty-something students agree?