Remembering how to read
Do you remember when you first realized you could read? I don’t. I have vivid memories of being read to as a small child (thank you, Dad, for doing all the voices) and how much I adored that. There must have been an aha! moment, or moments, when the sounds of the words aligned with the marks on the page and the shape of the story, but I don’t recall it. The closest I’ll ever get was watching my own kids learn to read—a process I found thrilling, fascinating, and still a bit mysterious.
Once I started reading, I didn’t stop. I was one of those kids with her nose always in a book. I didn’t really think about how I was reading or whether I could do it better. I just did more and more of it.
My friend Kate Marsh beautifully described her own omnivorous early reading in a 2023 essay in The Atlantic called “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading” [update: thank you to Joanne for the gift link!]:
When I was in elementary school, I gobbled up everything: haunting classics such as The Witch of Blackbird Pond and gimmicky series such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. By middle school, I was reading voluminous adult fiction like the works of Louisa May Alcott and J. R. R. Tolkien. Not every child is—or was—this kind of reader. But what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.
[I’m grateful nobody tried to teach me to read using the three-cueing method. Hat tip to Sarah Jeong, features editor of The Verge; read her recent Bluesky thread about it here.]
As I moved through school and out into the world and became a professional reader, writer, and editor, my reading took on nuances and complexities that young-reader me would have found baffling. I think I assumed I would just get better and better at it.
That was before social media and the Trump era. I want to lose myself in a book now more than ever—take me away from all this!—but I have to work at it now. The hardest part comes before I even start, when I have to put away my damn phone or close the computer and settle myself down to focus on words on a page.
When I was younger, before smartphones and the internet, it was harder to pull myself out of a book than to get pulled in (sometimes to the annoyance of adults who wanted me to get on with homework or some other distraction). I want to be that kind of reader again.
So I’m working at it. I got a cute lil sleeping-bag thingy for my phone (not a lockbox but weirdly effective at helping me to ignore my device). I asked for a dedicated e-reader for Xmas. My spouse and I have taken to reading out loud on these dark fall evenings. We’re about a hundred pages into The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, a gothic classic that I picked up after listening to Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, which I loved and highly recommend. (I write and post capsule reviews on Instagram—although that does feed the social media habit, so I should be careful with that.)
[“How do you find books to read?” A fine question, asked and answered by Anne Trubek at Notes from a Small Press.]
And of course there’s always a stack of things to read nearby in my house. I do not lack for books to lose myself in, once I remember that I still know how to do that.
Happy reading,
Jen
A paragraph from my memoir, about learning to read:
We live at the Hotel Cecil and my father drives me to the Playhouse School in the morning where I sit at the red but aspire to the blue table and learn to read long words in a book with shiny pages and pictures of British children in khaki shorts and sola topees. I can barely see the page in the blazing sun on the verandah where we sit. But then I see it: “bathtub.” Two syllables. The other words follow along.