What About Reading?

More and more oftenly I hear parents complaining that they can't get their children into reading. They'd give anything for it, but kids don't find it interesting and over. Other temptations are more and more luring and unfortunately there isn't time for everything. And then, who would want to be taken for the class' egghead for poring over his book, when the rest of his colleagues are talking about the latest mobile phone? Reading is therefore an ever more complicated story.

The truth is that today's children, just as yesterday's, did not learn in school the pleasure of reading. I believe this is where trouble springs from. Literature must be cool to grasp teenager attention. They have been stuffed with literary analyses that they learnt by heart for their exams, have gulped down texts that didn't speak in any way about them, so they went on thinking that reading is nothing else but a compulsory and nasty school subject, while books are objects that dust lies on when you keep them in the house.

The collection What About Reading? (Care-i faza cu cititul?) (published by Arthur Publishing, 2010, Liviu Papdima ed., illustrations by Irina Dobrescu) gathers 26 texts talking about the experiences of the first books read. The volume is nice and friendly, to be read in one breath and it looks good. The stories have everything to them: humour, melancholia, imagination. I was thinking while reading it that it is worth taking up reading just for this reason: being able to talk later about the first book you laid hands on.

Authors invited to contribute in the volume court their stubborn readers both with confessions and actual prose writing, with suspense and mysterious characters. There's nothing overdone here, the text actually do speak about children today and not about some heroic remote adventures. And I believe this is the secret: taming first young readers and later teach them the history of literature. This is how they will understand that literature is something living and that not all writers are dead and lined up in the portraits hanging up the walls one looks at when bored in the classroom.

What About Reading? is worth the credit for one other thing: I believe it can re-tie the knot of friendship between books and those who once used to read but, for various reasons, have abandoned the race. In other words, parents of children who won't take up reading. This is why they would better read this collection of stories together.

It is difficult to point stories I liked best and all contributors are worth mentioning. But I can tell you, to make you curious about it, that the first book Mircea Cărtărescu remembers was about a little girl who was born with three hearts and other spare parts, Dan Lungu tells the story of a little boy who learnt how to read on his elder's sister school book, Fanny Chartres how painful it is not to be able to read, which is called dyslexia in medical terms, Vlad Zografi about how books that never end, Simona Popescu writes a touching letter to a little girl about the unsuspecting delights of reading. Ioana Pârvulescu takes us for a tour in one uncle's old books shop, a character more mysterious that Mircea Eliade's heroes, Ioana Nicolaie writes a touching SF short story, Caius Dobrescu tells about the adventures of little girls looking for a stinky book... And I will let you discover yourself the rest of the authors.