What is it about reading that makes it a form of leisure? A nine-year-old came up with the answer that reading is fun because it is like watching TV and exercising at the same time.
Exercising? “Of course,” the boy said, “since you have to constantly turn the page!”
Interestingly, according to Wolfgang Iser, author of The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, “The reader’s enjoyment begins when he himself becomes productive”.
The reader works through the written pages, conjuring up mental images of characters, places and objects.
By picturing the descriptions set out before them, the reader is given the raw material with which to flesh out characters, visualise settings and wonder about the final outcome of the story.
The reader picks up clues and adds them up, reinforcing or discarding impressions according to how they tally with the subsequent action.
Iser calls the act of reading a “game”. Yet if, like any other game, it is to prove entertaining, the book in question can neither be too difficult to make sense of, nor too easy.
Take, for example, a novel. To be sufficiently engaging, it must appeal to the reader’s tastes, capabilities andrepertoire of background knowledge.
A person reading The Hobbit by JRR. Tolkien is the kind of reader who takes pleasure in a tale fashioned from myth, legend and fantasy. They will, therefore, enjoy using the imagination to accompany Bilbo Baggins on his quest to slay the dragon Smaug.
A person reading The Upstairs Room by Joanna Reiss may, on the other hand, prefer realism since this book is an autobiographical novel about World War II.
If the reader is to make it to the final page of any novel, they must be equipped to cope with a number of demands.
The reader is, in fact, constantly encouraged to do a certain amount of guesswork to understand and appreciate both the story and the way in which the story is narrated.
It may not be so obvious at first but all readers – children included – are required to rise to a number of challenges throughout the course of reading. Children, in particular, may come across unfamiliar words, concepts or historical events – be it a picture book or a young adult novel.
How does the reader deal with this unfamiliarity? This challenge may be tackled by using one’s imagination and delving into one’s repertoire of knowledge to read between the lines.
This is why a novel is a game: it involves a lot of mental wrangling and guesswork.
Take, for example, the first paragraph of The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler by Gene Kemp: “We’d gone right through the school collecting the teacher’s tea money and had got to the canteen door when Danny waved the £10 note at me. It took me a couple of minutes to realise what it was, ‘cos it looked highly unlikely in Danny’s grimy mitt. Then I pushed him into the canteen, sure to be empty on a Friday afternoon at five to three.”
Although it is not stated, a reader will most probably assume that Danny and the narrator are students. A reader may also decide that the narrator is the weirdly named Tyke Tiler of the novel’s title although there is, as yet, no evidence of this.
The reader may then assume that Danny has stolen the £10 note: this is implied by the fact that the narrator pushed Danny into the canteen precisely because nobody is usually in there on Fridays.
As the reader works through this first paragraph, they have figured out that the school in question is a major setting in the book – the place where the story will unfold – and has already started to flesh out two of the novel’s characters.
The reader then reinforces or discards these impressions according to how they tally with the action which follows as they progress through the first chapter. This to-and-fro movement characterises the reader’s effort to use information gathered from one sentence to the next to understand the story and experience a life which is not their own.
Why is this so important, particularly for young readers? As Iser notes, the reader “must think in terms of experiences different from his own”, thus broadening horizons and maturing psychologically.
Reading is, therefore, a means to develop the ability to empathise with other beings, a means of imagining what it would be like to walk in their shoes.
The reader suspends disbelief and – for the length of the book – is offered the opportunity to live a life which is not their own with all the emotion this has to offer.
Such a book has, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “the capacity to arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating of the heart, pity, laughter, tension, relief, wonder”.
And all at the turn of a page.
Useful reading
Picture books
o Rosie’s Walk (1968) – Pat Hutchins
o Tusk Tusk (1978) – David McKee
o The Writing on the Wall (1983) – Leon Garfield and Michael Bragg
o Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy (1983) – Lynley Dodd
Older readers
o Seven Little Australians (1894) – Ethel Turner
o Swallows and Amazons (1930) – Arthur Ransome
o Ballet Shoes (1936) – Noel Streatfeild
o The Borrowers (1952) – Mary Norton
o Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) – Robert C O’Brien
o The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) – Penelope Lively
o Bill’s New Frock (1989) – Anne Fine
o The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) – Rosemary Sutcliff
o Handles (1983) – Jan Mark
o Blitzcat (1989) – Robert Westall
o The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (1997) – Peter Dickinson
o Kit’s Wilderness (2000) – David Almond