What counts as reading?

I was forbidden to learn to read before I went to school, lest I get too bored in the initial years, become habituated to goofing off, and fail to develop good study habits. This, the family legend goes, was the fate of my uncle, who, being the youngest child, learned to read from his siblings and by the time he went to school, had nothing to learn, and became a poor student as a result. He got so bored he could never focus.

The forbidden art #

Solution: no reading for preschool AK! My parents refused to teach me. My grandparents were forbidden. Do not teach AK to read until it's time! It was OK to read to me, but no one was too teach me letters or what they meant. All around me, a forbidden world of meaning. I tried to trick people who didn't know about the edict to teach me to read and write, and an older friend taught me the letter A. I managed to pick up some other letters, or I guess, deduce them from context. I grew up in a country with alphabetic writing, so the set of letters was pretty small. Moreover, Polish is written in a mostly phonetic way, so it's somewhat easier to start guessing at the relationships between symbols and their sounds.

For a while, my grandfather stayed with us, and while he wouldn't teach me letters, I convinced him that it would not be a violation of the edict to keep me illiterate if we played a fun game where I wrote letters on a chalkboard and then he tried to say the words. What is this word? I'd say holding up a string of random letters, probably with lots of As in them. And he'd pretty much always say, that's not a word. And then I'd try to get him to say it out loud.

I'm pretty sure I doodled this while thinking about Of Grammatology.

Despite these attempts, I did not manage to learn to read before I started school. Annoyingly, when I did start school, I found it somewhat hard to learn to read and I remember sitting with my mom looking at words in a book and feeling very annoyed. Turns out, decoding one or two words in a row is a different skill than sitting still and reading multiple words in a row, row after row, and not losing your place or feeling your mind just slip away between black ink into aggressive boredom.^[1]

Eventually I overcame that initial hump, and started reading anything I could get my hands on. No books were forbidden to me in the house, and at a pretty young age I read my mom's college astronomy textbook, a reference guide to Ancient Greek gods and heroes, Sinuhe the Egyptian^[2], W pustyni i w puszczy, The Odyssey and probably some age-appropriate things, too.

I read the novels from beginning to end, but the text books and reference guide I read as I pleased. The mythology reference guide had an index, and I learned to use that and quite enjoyed it. I could skip around to the bits that interested me most. Was cruising through the index and reading little bits reading? It certainly wouldn't have counted in a reading contest.

Ruin reading with gamification #

There was a contest in second grade to see who could read the most books. I refused to change what I was reading, being at the time on a tear through various things related to Ancient Egypt. I don't know if I read Sinuhe the Egyptian because of the obsession or if it sparked it. In any case, I felt it would be stooping to something to put aside my doorstopers just for the sake of a contest. Nonetheless, I felt personally insulted by my poor showing in the reading contest compared to kids who were reading mere kids books^[3].

Just a bit over a year later, I had cause to once again be outraged by a book reading context. Now in the US, and in 3rd or maybe 4th grade, I participated in a somewhat more sensible reading context. Here, the prizes were awarded for the number of pages read. And I think there were real prizes. Things like stickers and bookmarks, plus the pride of coloring in your book reading meter. As the contest started, I was reading in both English and Polish, having had to learn English because of the whole moving to the US thing. I was reading my way through the entire Anne of Green Gables series, which my family happened to have in Polish. But oh no, I was told, possibly when I tried to add one of the book's translated Polish titles to the log, only books in English count for the reading contest!

Oh, so it's not a reading contest. It's a pedagogical English skills exercise, I thought, though not in those words, and this is bullshit, also definitely not in those words because it took me much longer to learn to swear than to develop basic English fluency because swearing is a pretty nuanced language skill that requires not only knowing words but navigating sensitive social situations appropriately. But damn it, I wanted those stickers, and the worm bookmark, and I wanted to fucking win. So I put aside Ania z Zielonego Wzgórza and read the entire Mary Poppins series instead during book contest month.

Allegories of reading contests #

Reading contests replace the intrinsic thrill of reading--the thrill of decoding secret messages laid down by people in the past, people who might even be dead but whose words and information are still available, of seeking the signifier behind every sign and forcing it to surface from the sea of signification, catching it and landing it, and gutting it and reading its entrails and taking strength from its flesh--and replaces it with quantifiable constrained achievements which you may trade for stickers to stick on your notebook and badges to paste in your feed. Because, why? Because reading is good for you? I mean, I guess. I suppose. Actually, I'm not sure I believe that anyway, not at all. Must we justify every pleasure by saying it's good for you? Or damn it by saying it's sinful? What a silly pattern.

This view of reading as some virtuous activity one must practice for one's health, like flossing or eating enough fiber, combined with the impulse to quantify and possibly gamify said virtuous activity, is, I think, the cause of many hangups people have about certain kinds of reading being fake reading. In a reading contest, you have to set some rules, and if you don't follow them you're cheating. If all reading activity is a competitive game, then anyone who doesn't play by whatever you internalized as the Official Rules of Reading is cheating. And cheating is wrong and bad and immoral, unlike real reading, which is healthy and moral and also somehow morally superior.

That's a pretty bad attitude to hold toward other people, but it's even worse if you've internalized it and it's ruined the enjoyment of reading for you because the way you like to read is fake. Which is silly and also sad.

Fake rules about real reading #

Being the moustache twirling cultural relativist that I am, I would like to tell you that what counts as real or fake reading is culturally determined and has changed over time. Here's a list of some of these fake rules:

• You can only really read a text if someone else reads it out loud to you first.
• It's only real reading if you speak the words out loud.
• It's only real reading if you read the work multiple times.
• It's only real reading if you read silently.
• It's only real reading if you use your eyes to read the words.
• It's only real reading if you read the whole book from start to finish.
• It's only real reading if you read one book at a time.
• It's only real reading if you read it within a set period of time, not picking it up bit by bit over the years.
• It's only real reading if it's a paper book.
• It's only real reading if it's a paper book you own.
• It's only real reading if it's a novel.
• It's only real reading if you mark up the book, take notes, analyze it, and can lead a seminar session about it.
• It's only real reading if it's the first time you read the book.
• It's only real reading if you fully understand and absorb the book the first time you read it, without needing to re-read parts, or pause to think about it.
• It's only real reading if you read proper literature that you need to pause and think about, not trash like genre fiction.

And some recently invented ways of reading tend to get marked as fake:

• Ebooks read using a dedicated ebook reader.
• Ebooks read using a smartphone.
• Audio books narrated by a human narrator.
• Books read as text-to-speech.

I'm particularly amused by all the animus against consuming books as sound, since the very notion of silently reading a text to yourself is very modern. People used to sit around while one person read out loud to them. There is a whole history of moral panics about direct access to the text^[4], or of the very notion of written text signifying meaning directly instead of being the signifier of a sound that signifies meaning. It just shows how fake the idea of fake reading is.

The overflowing bedside table #

When I was a kid, my dad had to go to the hospital for a stomach ulcer. He didn't seem that sick but he was apparently pretty bored because he had to stay there and rest, and so he read a lot. When I came to visit him, I saw that he had a huge pile of books on his hospital bedside table. I asked which book he was reading, and he said he was reading all of them. He explained that he'd read a bit from one, and when he tired of it, he'd switch to another one. That struck me as a bit odd, but also, pretty clever.

I read like my dad did in the hospital, with multiple books in progress, dipping in and out of them as I please. If I ever feel I ought to finish a book, it's because I want to have learned what it has to say, not to check it off my list.^[5] It's all real reading. Unless you're in some kind of reading contest, though, if you're an adult, I wonder, why? Are the stickers that good?