The Joy of Reading: The Stories of Ancient Alexandrians and Ancient Egyptians, and the Implications for their Retention and Understanding of Classical Literature

The larger problem, however, is in viewing books as a means to some other end. Many people who want to read more are motivated by a promise that they will benefit from doing so. Even the obsession with retention assumes that the purpose of reading is to absorb knowledge or nuggets of trivia that one can use to demonstrate cultural literacy or being “well read.” What all of this obscures is the possibility that books might be a source of intrinsic pleasure, an end in themselves. I’d be willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences with the joy of literature were aural. Most of us were read to by adults before we learned to read ourselves, and listening to audiobooks recalls the distinctive delight of being told a story: the rhythms of the prose made incarnate in a human voice; the dialog animated through the performance of a skillful reader; the ease with which our eyes, liberated from the page, are free to roam around the bedroom (or the aerobics room, or the landscape beyond the car windshield) so as to better imagine the actions of the narrative playing out.

I don’t pay too much attention to what your literary friends say. When it comes down to it, people who think about reading in terms of how much they count seem to not actually enjoy books all that much. Their moralistic gloom is evident in the extent to which reading has come to resemble exercise, with readers tracking their word-count metrics, trying to improve their speed, and joining clubs to keep them accountable.

Oral storytelling predates writing by millennia, and many of the oldest stories in our literary canon existed for centuries as bardic tales before they were put down in print. The Homeric epics likely originated with bards who told them around fires and improvised their central plot points, which were passed down and adapted from one generation to the next. I don’t believe that members of the cultures were consciously thinking when they thought about the functions of these rituals, but Evolutionary biologists have all sorts of theories about the function of these rituals. They were riveted by their power, and so they listened to stories.

The early stories were mostly written in verse, at a time when poetry, music, andstorytelling were all so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. And I suspect that audiobook fans are at least partly drawn to listening because it’s easier to discern the melodic qualities of prose, which often get lost when we quickly scan a page of text without actually hearing the words in our heads. The right hemisphere of the brain is involved in music, poetry, and spirituality and may be more engaged with listening. This could explain how some religious texts can be read aloud. The scholar believes that the scripture’s many variations and repetition only take on their full effect when voiced by a gifted reciter who can help people to slow down.

It’s difficult to remember the last book you ever read, regardless of how you used it, as most people do. It is suggested that many books you have encountered have failed to live up to their potential if you want to read more. Anxieties about post-literacy tend to focus obsessively on the question of medium, and audiobooks are often hailed as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, alongside social media, visual entertainment, and the decline in attention spans. But it seems to me that there exists a more obvious explanation for why reading often feels so dull: Most books are very bad. Most are uninspired, unconvincing, and poorly written. It has been the case for a long time, even if there were some flops among those bardic epics of yore. When a culture falls prey to an obsession with “reading challenges” and daily word count goals, it is all too easy to become inured to the shoddiness of the texts we’ve chosen and more difficult to object to the offensive quality of many of the books on offer.

Some ambassadors handle multilateral negotiations and host elaborate events at embassies. But author Jason Reynolds spent his ambassadorship talking to young people about literature.

He celebrates his last day as a national ambassador on Tuesday. He was appointed to an unprecedented third year in the position at the end of 2021, after he was inaugurated in a two-year position.

Bringing awareness to the young people of the Holocaust: A tribute to James Reynolds, Ambassador to the Future, and a hope for the next generation

He said that he could not convince young people that their story was as important as their teachers and parents’ were trying to get them to read.

The Pandemic made it difficult to make “human moments with young people” when he was on the internet. He asked for another year to carry out his platform, because he would have taken a fourth year if needed.

“Stories happen to be the most human thing we have to offer, right?” He says so. It means the work that we are doing is actually human work. I want the next person to understand that, and that is what I am trying to make sure of.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/13/1142418939/jason-reynolds-literature-ambassador-young-people

Why do young people read? An example of Richard Wright’s Black Boy & the importance of finding a place for different people in the world

It’s boring. That is the reason why. It’s boring if we’re talking about learning differences. Which is a very different conversation. The majority of young people do not like to read because it takes too long and is boring. By the way, I don’t disagree with these things. I don’t think all reading is boring, but I do think some reading is boring. And I think it’s unfair for us to act like we as adults don’t know that to be true. There are lots of kids looking for different things. I think there are some young people growing up in environments where they’re desperately seeking to escape and see themselves slay the dragon. We have a lot of books for those young people. Right. But I also think that there are other young folks who are just looking for a starting point. The beginning point needs to be like them and sound like them.

As a black person, I can feel safe if I spot the Black people in a room and I can see everyone more clearly when I see them, right? I’m open in a different way, right? I think that’s a human thing. When it comes to literature, it is the same thing.

I felt that they were out of touch with my reality. I felt that books just made me look like the person that I was, by removing me from the idea, right? If I’m not shown or if I don’t exist in a story, then that means that somebody doesn’t find my life valuable enough to talk about, right? So why would I engage in something that’s not engaging with me? … One book will never be enough, right? We could write 500,000 books, but they won’t capture the Latinx experience. We talk about things that are different. It’s not just diversity but also creating space for different groups. There are so many different versions of those stories that it is necessary to write diverse versions. All of us are human beings.

It was Richard Wright’s Black Boy. And the reason I finished it is because on the second page of the book, young Richard Wright sets the curtains on fire and burns his grandmother’s house down. This won’t be a boring book. I would like to get to the good part of the book in 100 pages. Richard Wright hooked me. I was willing to go along for the ride after he hooked me. The feeling of completion is a small part of the battle. Once you know that you’ve done something, the rush of joy makes you want to do it again.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/13/1142418939/jason-reynolds-literature-ambassador-young-people

How do you lose weight in life? What do you want to know about books and how to read, how much should we read? How can we catch up?

Yeah, it’s definitely something to consider It’s a frightening thing. But but you know, I’ll be honest with you, as concerned as I am about reading loss and learning loss, I’m not nearly as concerned about that than I am with the loss for the desire to live. And so though I want young people to catch up, what I know is that is possible, right? We can catch up when the reading is done. We can catch up with some of the deficiencies or they may have already been fixed. We can’t catch up on a person who has had enough and is ready to hang it up. I love books, but at the end of the day they’re just not as important to young people as they are to me.

Whoever takes on this road next, all I want them to do is make sure that they understand that this is not an award. This is a job. They have to throw themselves at it with gusto and love in order to make sure that they know that we care about them, even if they don’t read or write.