My life is all about words: Writing words, reading words, saying
words, correcting words, making up words.
My life is all about words: Writing words, reading words, saying words, correcting words, making up words.
I read for a living; write for a living; teach writing for a living. There aren’t enough words to explain how many words appear before my eyes in a day or a week or a year.
In the morning, the first thing I do after trying to wake my sons up is to walk outside to get my two newspapers. Some people need coffee to get them going in the morning; I need to read the Free Lance to learn about local news and the San Jose Mercury News to find out how badly my favorite Bay Area sports teams are doing.
At school, I turn on my computer and read my e-mail. I print a copy of the school’s daily bulletin and I read that as well. Then I’ll read it out loud to my classes. More often than not, there will be some student papers to read and comment upon during the day. It’s word upon word upon word in my life – and I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Words strung together in sentences tell us what to think; they express what we think; they explain the way we think. The slightest misplacement or juxtaposition of letters in a word can change its meaning entirely, perhaps even rendering it meaningless. Hat can become hate. Dog can become God. A dude can become a dud.
Despite my affinity for words and my professional obligations to read and write them, I had until recently gotten away from the purest enjoyment of words – reading a good book.
Television is great at transporting us around the globe or showing us what the inside of a rapper’s crib looks like. It can put pictures to words to show us the devastation of a flood or the majesty of the flight of a bird. It can show us the raw emotion of a prospective bachelorette not getting a rose from her TV prince or the disappointment when an aspiring singer gets booted off “American Idol.”
Nothing, however, compares to getting lost in a good book. There are no directors or producers showing us what the setting looks like. Actors don’t determine how a character appears in our mind. That’s all up to us.
Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” – my two summer reading escapes – dragged me along on breathless, compelling adventures with twists and turns and surprises. It was all like television in my head. It was theater of the mind. I controlled the pacing. I could rewind and read a passage twice for emphasis. I decided what the main character looked like (he sure didn’t look like Tom Hanks). There was no product placement or commercial breaks.
I could take the story with me to my room, on a plane, on the couch, in a lawn chair. The story waited for me when I went away and stayed with me when I put down the book.
I’m certainly not breaking any news to book readers. They know the joy and pure escapism that comes with curling up with a good book – or a raunchy one.
San Benito High School is trying an interesting experiment this year; requiring all students, teachers, and administrators to do “sustained silent reading” for at least 10 minutes per day, Tuesday through Friday, during a new advisory/tutorial period. High school students are already avid readers – of text messages, MySpace Web pages, and e-mails.
Now, we’re trying to get them to take a few minutes to step away from the harried, electronic world and slip into the quietude of a book or a magazine. There’s no pressure to read 19th century literature or Shakespearean sonnets, unless they want to. They choose what they want to read, from magazines to newspapers to paperbacks, all in the name of learning.
They don’t get graded on it or have to write a report citing the plot and describing character formation. They simply must read.
The early returns are encouraging. The school has no delusions of making everyone a book hound, but at least it is letting students know that reading can be more than just an element of standardized education – it can be a portal into other worlds, or thoughts, or centuries.
By the way, Barnes and Noble in Gilroy is donating 15 percent of every purchase this weekend to the San Benito High School library. All you have to do is let the cashier know that you want to take part in the fundraiser.
Thanks for reading!
Adam Breen teaches yearbook and journalism at San Benito High School. He is former editor of The Free Lance. You may send him comments, column ideas, or maybe a book suggestion to [email protected].
