Twenty Chances To Make New Readers

by Jas Faulkner

Many of the stories that came in following this year’s World Book Night were inspirational. People chose to go to shelters, public kitchens and areas where they were likely to find people for whom the idea of owning a book was way down on the list below all of the details of staying alive. In some accounts, recipients said they’d never had a book of their very own before.

When reading is like breathing, it is hard to imagine a life without the comfort of having one’s mind enfolded into the internal theatre that comes to life with the turn of a page. To know that someone out there might not have owned a book if not for World Book Night speaks to the current economic situation, but it also points to a rift between what is dictated as needful and what is merely a fanciful conceit, holding that people deserve more than they do by those who want desperately to speak for all of us. To some extent, we have gone from a society where college graduates admit to reading their last novel sometime around their sophomore year to one where individuals might not actively pick a book to read on their own past the sixth grade.

It’s a shame. It really is. It should also scare anyone who cares about the general health of our society that libraries are devolving into vestigal shadows of their former selves. Among the obligatory shelves that must pass muster with local In many school systems, librarians now alternate between locations, with school libraries open to students for only a couple of hours at a time. Public libraries, stripped of their funding, often depend on book sales, what grants they can snag, contributions and book sales to keep the lights on. Once again, with feeling: It’sa shame.

So when the time came to pick up my giver’s box, I thought hard about how I would give out twenty copies of Kate DCamillo’s “Because of Winn-Dixie”. Having coordinated take-home libraries at shelters before, I knew the drill. I also knew this would be like Christmas for nearly every facility in the Nashville area. Time to think of some other way to make this box of twenty books
count.

Then I remembered a little girl I encountered in my local library. Her father was standing in the middle of floor, looking around impatiently and every few minutes his daughter would run up, show him a book and he would either nod and take it from her or shake his head and she would run back to the children’s section to find another one. At one point, she ran up, stood squarely in front of him and held up a book with both hands, grinning broadly.

“Aw Puddin’, you really don’t want to read that, do you?”

Her smile faded.

“You don’t need to read about bugs. Go get a book for girls. Something with kittens or horses or something.”

She walked slowly back to the children’s section, reading as much of the book as she could. One of the librarians noticed the exchange and approached the man, asking him if he might want to find a book for himself.

“I read my last book in college,” was his response, “After that, I was done. I only read what I have to for my job.”

He was well dressed, his daughter’s clothes looked expensive and tasteful. Such a contrast to my own working class immigrant father who once told a librarian that if I wanted to read actual books instead of Disney adaptations he thought I could handle the consequences of being a girl who “might grow up to think things.” (Yes, somewhere there is a university that produced a librarian who warned against girls growing up to “think things”.)

One suggestion made by a friend who had been working with givers in her city was create a personal mission. I decided that mine would be to encourage families to read together. Instead of simply heading out with a givers box, a sure magnet for anyone who simply wanted free stuff without particularly wanting a book; I took a large shoulder bag where ever I went. Whenever I saw an a parent (or possibly grandparent) with a child, I approached them, introduced myself and gave a very brief explanation of World Book Night after which I asked them if I they would be interested in setting aside some time to read to or with their child. Twenty yeses later, there were moms, dads, and grandmas telling their kids that they were all going to spend some time with ten-year-old Opal Buloni and her best buddy, a big mutt named Winn-Dixie.

Five minutes of chat ending with a book going from my hands to theirs might not change the world. However, it might change the world for someone who looks up as their mom or dad draws a breath and prepares to close the cover after reading a chapter.

“Mama. What happened next?”

Don’t make them wait too long to find out.