When I was in Year Nine there was a nationwide attempt to get kids reading, and so a reading challenge, sponsored by a corporation I can no longer remember, was set in place.
Were there prizes? I don’t remember. There must have been, even if it was $50 for your school to buy more books for the library, because for one girl in our year, the stakes were mystifyingly high. I remember the girl’s glasses and her long curly hair because she had her picture printed in the school newsletter. At a high school of over 2000 kids, it was a big deal to get a mention in the newsletter and few students managed this level of fame over the course of five years’ secondary education. The girl with the glasses and the curly brown hair had read over 100 books in a matter of weeks. This seemed an impossible feat.
I had a friend who had volunteered as a school librarian during that period. It was well-known among the librarian-set that the girl with the glasses and the long, curly brown hair did not actually read all those books. Instead, she wrote the requisite synopsis on her reading log by taking cues from the back of the paperbacks before conjuring opinions out of thin air. She had been spending her lunchtimes fiddling the paperwork.
For what aim, no one really knew. I’m still a bit flummoxed by it. I suppose no teacher thought to cross check because who on earth would do such a thing? Lunchtimes spent alone in libraries copying book synopses is an unlikely leisure pursuit by any sane person’s estimations.
I was reminded of that girl with the glasses and the long, curly brown hair when I read this headline: 9-year-old girl devours 364 books in 7 months! though I’d like to clarify that I don’t automatically doubt the veracity of this particular achievement. I have also known in my time kids who are genuinely voracious readers, to a problematic point even, and nine-year-old Faith Jackson may indeed by a wunderkind.
More recently I have been listening to the Book Riot podcast, with Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky, who never seem to read anything I’m reading (okay so it’s the other way round) but who are each so enthusiastic about books in general that it’s infectious. I just want to rush off and read those books, or any books — all the books! These are two heavy readers who know a lot about books and publishing. So I was both reassured and disturbed to hear Rebecca say on a recent episode that no matter how she arranges her life, in any given year she can’t seem to get around to reading more than about 8o or 90 books per annum.
I’ve never managed that many. I also have a period of about 15 years in my life where I read nothing at all outside textbooks and work stuff. So I feel I have a lot to catch up on. For the past three years I’ve set myself the challenge of reading a book a week, and I have managed it — barely, each time — by including a few children’s books and comics, which can be read in a single sitting.
It fills me with horror and panic to think that I’ll get to the end of my life and will have most certainly failed, miserably, to read even a small subset of the books that I know I’d love to read, even if I work my way up to 80 or 90 books per year, as Rebecca does, and even if I lead a long and mentally astute life.
It’s almost enough to make a person rush out and read the backs of paperbacks, checking them off on some sort of reading log. Anything, anything at all to quell the Reading Demons who chase me through the labyrinth of book review sites, biting at my bookmarks and snarling at my spectacles, chanting, ‘Read, read as fast as you can! You’ll never catch up, no matter your plan!’
