Saturday, September 12, 2015

Librarian State of Mind



Conversing with friends and colleagues about reading for the past weeks has livened up strong desires to encourage more people to read, give the appropriate materials to read and so on. I am in a librarian state of mind. There are also visions of book clubs and the somewhat disturbing live-action roleplaying of famed characters from prominent literature. Those might be dated antics or gimmicks, but I am willing to let anything slide just to promote reading/learning.

I have not practised being a librarian at length; I am not even a practising (paid) one right now. The last time I was an employed librarian was also the first time I had a library accredited, which is more than three years ago. The accreditor, a rather experienced lady, commented that I looked nothing like a librarian. Before I took out my professional license to invalidate her allegations, she clarified that it was a compliment. Actually, I did read her quip as a compliment. But that would be discussed in a succeeding entry. So reading...

I am going through Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book: A Guide to Intelligent Reading.” It is a classic, having gone through several edition reprints. This is one book that hopefully more people would read. For all the talk about the importance of literacy in a global civilization, reading comprehension is something that's been found wanting. Adler's introduction to the readers is deserves its sharpness:

"This is a book for readers who cannot read. They may sound rude, though I do not mean to be. It may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. The appearance of rudeness and contradiction arises only from the variety of senses in which the word 'reading' can be used. The reader who has read thus far surely can read, in some sense of the word. You can guess, therefore, what I must mean. It is that this book is intended for those who can read in some sense of 'reading"" but not in others. There are many kinds of reading and degrees of ability to read. It is not contradictory to say that this book is for readers who want to read better or want to read in some other way than they now can."

The skill of reading is not just about pronouncing and recognising words: it’s understanding what happens as one reads: what the article is saying, what the author is actually doing, etc. A simple illustration: observe what's becoming commonplace in social media. There are miscreants who share satirical news to spite people who cannot read (the better sort of miscreant, I might add) and there are those who share because they don't know what they've just read.

So I am brewing some posts on reading, learning and things in between. Not to steal any thunder from my good friend, the Bad Book Burner, I would also feature book reviews and hopefully helpful book recommendations.

Librarians are not exactly the lucrative professionals of contemporary culture. "We have Google!" would be a good justification for the near extinction of our kind. But access to information is not exactly access to the right kind of information. Similarly, reading skill is definitely not equivalent to good reading comprehension.

"[A] culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?" - Lucien, Sandman (Volume 9): The Kindly Ones



Photos: Dream of the Endless by Todd Klein (header); Sandman (Volume 9): The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman

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