As a kid, I actively disliked music. Whenever my mom put a tape on (yes, I am that old), I reacted with disgust and despair. Okay, not really–I mostly reacted with indifference and impatience. It’s not like listening to The Phantom of the Opera or The Eagles hurt my ears or anything; it just seemed like an enormous waste of time for something that wasn’t very much fun.
But since my sister is significantly older than me (six and a half years, what?), I was still in elementary school when she hit her terrible teens. So even as I was dying inside, having to listen to Nirvana every time it came on the fucking radio, I was still sitting back and taking notes–figuratively, of course. My sister was HUGELY into music. She loved it, adored it, spent much of her time and energy listening to it and collecting it. “Okay,” I thought, “when I grow up, I’ll like music, because that is apparently what happens.”
Well, not really.
I no longer actively dislike music, but I’ve never come to appreciate it in anything but the most perfunctory fashion. Honestly, I could really take it or leave it. Is it nice to listen to music while I’m running? Yeah, beats the alternative. But it’s not necessary, and I haven’t kept up with new music since I was in high school. As a teenager, learning about the latest bands and all their quirks and foibles was part of life: it was a gateway into teen culture. Once I left for college, however, I ditched it. I didn’t care. I met plenty of people who got into “alternative” music while they were getting their undergraduate degrees, but I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I got a little impatient when they started going on and on about the new band they’d just discovered, or the old favorite that was playing nearby. It seemed like a boring waste of time to me, and I didn’t understand why I was supposed to give a shit.
And don’t even get me started on concerts: I’ve never gotten why other people spend good money to stand in a crowded room with drunks and listen to songs they’ve heard a million times before.
By this point most of the audience is probably clutching its pearls, but here’s my point: I don’t particularly like music. Over a lifetime of constant exposure, I’ve gained a certain knowledge of and appreciation for it, but I will never truly love it. In times of stress, it is not what I go to; I will never spend my days counting down the moments until a new album is released. This does not make me a less insightful or less thoughtful person. It just makes me a person who doesn’t particularly like music.
So why did I want to share this with you? Simple: NPR ran another one of those insufferable interviews with an insufferable author who spoke insufferably about how people don’t read anymore and how that means we are all going to experience cultural and intellectual death. Or something of that nature. And this interview annoyed me on a number of levels, but the most basic of them is this: enjoying the act of reading does not make you a good person. It does not make you a thoughtful person. It does not make you a compassionate or insightful person. It just makes you a person who likes to read. Therefore, the underlying idea that fewer readers equals GREAT CULTURAL TRAVESTY is just…ugh. At the end of the day, reading and writing are simply ways to communicate. There are other ways to communicate. If reading goes out of style, it will not be the end of the fucking world.
But honestly? I’m not so sure that reading IS going out of style. I don’t have statistics on this because I don’t care that much, but I do have a little bit of historical knowledge, and that makes me dangerous. A lot of the moaning and groaning that goes on in the literary world is based upon a bunch of flawed assumptions, the first of which is that in the past, everyone was smarter and read more. The truth is that in the past, the vast majority of the world was illiterate, and the people who could afford to learn how to read, read incessantly because there was nothing better to do. And just like today, they read trash. Seriously, most of the books that were “best sellers” in the 1800s? Got lost in the trash heap of history where they belonged.
In short, the idea that we have lost this literary Eden is bullshit. People used to read more, yes, but only some people, and they honestly had nothing else to entertain themselves.
That being said, we live in a literate society. In order to fully function in American society, you need to be able to read. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to do it in your spare time, but you need to be able to intake and digest information that has been written out. If you can’t, then you’ll be at a serious disadvantage, possibly one so huge that you won’t be able to recover from it.
So for me, I feel like literacy education needs to emphasize utility, not necessarily enjoyment. When I was in public school, teachers made us read books with the expectation (okay, the prayer) that we would enjoy them. Luckily for me, I did, and luckily for me, I became very adept at reading and absorbing information that way. Other kids weren’t so fortunate. They just didn’t like reading, for whatever reason, and instead of stressing things like, “You’re going to need to read the fucking directions if you want to put together a bookshelf,” teachers kept trying to make them enjoy Island of the Blue Dolphins or whatever.
Which brings me back to my original point: me hating music. At the end of the day, I became reasonably familiar with music and its cultural importance not because I actually learned to LOVE music, but because plenty of people showed me that it was important that I understand it to a certain degree. I have a feeling that teaching kids to be adept at reading might work in a similar way. I mean, I know plenty of people who “don’t like to read” who will read nonfiction books about subjects they care about because they see the utility of it. Unfortunately, they don’t start doing this until they’re already adults, and they pretty much have to decide to do it on their own, because teachers are so busy pushing the “liking” issue that school is pretty much wall-to-wall fiction. Maybe we need to back away from the issue of enjoyment and talk about reading as a means to an end–and show concrete proof that it is a means to an end and something that actually matters.
And yes, I know that this argument is probably paining everyone who’s reading it, because this site is targeted to giant dorks who like the books. It pains me, too. But seriously. When you get right down to it, it is deeply weird that people spend a great deal of time crafting strange objects, and then hitting them or blowing in them or whatever it is they need to do to create just the right sound. It’s even weirder that I’m supposed to care about people who do this–that I am, in fact, expected to sit and listen to them do it, and pay them money for the pleasure. It’s equally weird that someone came up with a bunch of little symbols that represent words, and then wrote them down on paper, and then expected you to spend hours of your day staring at them rapturously. IT’S ALL WEIRD. None of it is “just part of being human” and none of it is something that we should expect the entire world to enjoy.
Finis
