Voices of Readers: How We Come to Love Books. INSTITUTION National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill
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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 295 136 CS 009 170 AUTHOR Carlsen, G. Robert; Sherrill, Anne TITLE Voices of Readers: How We Come To Love Books. INSTITUTION National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill. REPORT NO ISBN-0-8141-5639-8 PUB DATE 88 NOTE 163p. AVAILABLE FROMNational Council of Teachers of English, 1111 Kenyon Rd, Urbana, IL 61801 (Stock No. 56398-015, $6.95 member, $8.75 nonmember). PUB TYPE Books (010) -- Viewpoints (120) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC07 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Autobiographies; Elementary Secondary Education; Family Influence; Librarians; Libraries; *Literature Appreciation; Naturalistic Observation; Peer Influence; Poetry; Postsecondary Education; Preschool Education; Reader Text Relationship; Reading Aloud to Others; *Reading Attitudes; *Reading Habits; Reading Instruction; *Reading Interests; Reading Research; *Recreational Reading; Student Writing Models; Teacher Influence; Teaching Methods IDENTIFIERS Book Ownership; Book Reports; Classics (Literature); *Reading Behavior; *Reading Motivation; Reading Uses; Romance Novels ABSTRACT Drawing on thousands of "reading autobiographies," in which generations of students wrote about their experiences with reading, this book investigates what makes young people want to read. Chapters include: (1) Growing with Books; (2) Learning To Read; (3) Literature and the Human Voice; (4) Reading Habits and Attitudes: When, Where, and How; (5) Sources for Books; (6) Reading and Human Relations; (7) What Books Do for Readers; (8) Subliterature; (9) Teachers and Teaching: The Secondary School Years; (10) Libraries and Librarians; (11) The Reading of Poetry; (12) The Classics; (13) Barriers: Why People Don't Read; and (14) Final Discussion. (ARH) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can bo made * * from the original document. * *********************************************************************** Voices of Readers How We Come to Love Books G. Robert Carlsen Anne Sherrill National Council of Teachers of English 1111 Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801 NCTE Editorial Board: Donald R. Gallo, Thomas Newkirk, Raymond J. Rodrigues, Dorothy S. Strickland, Brooke Workman, L. Jane Christensen, ex officio, John Lansingh Bennett, ex officio Staff Editor: Robert A. Heister Cover Design: Michael J. Getz Interior Book Design: Tom Kovacs for TGK Design NCTE Stock Number 56398 © 1988 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to an3 particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of r_Sectors, or the membership at large, except in annount ements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carlsen, G. Robert, 191'7 - Voices of readers : how we come to love books / G. Robert Carlsen, Anne Sherrill. p. cm. ISBN 0-8141-5639-8 1. Books and reading United States.2. Children United States Books and reading.3. Librarians United States Books and read- ing.4. Teachers United States Books and reading. I. Sherrill, Anne.II. Title. Z1003.2.C371988 028'.9 -- dc19 87-37541 4 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Growing with Books 1 2 Learning to Read 29 3 Literature and the Human Voice 39 4 Reading Habits and Attitudes: When, Where, and How 49 5 Sources for Books 59 6 Reading and Human Relations 69 7 What Books Do for Readers 77 8 Sub literature 87 9 Teachers and Teaching: The Secondary School Years 95 10 Libraries and Librarians 107 11 The Reading of Poetry 121 12 The Classics 129 13 Barriers: Why People Don't Read 137 14 Final Discussion 145 v Acknowledgments We are grateful to the thousands of students who passed throughour classes and who wrote the original autobiographies from which the protocols in this book have been extracted. We especially mention Dr. Dale Paul Hauser, whose complete paper begins chapter 1. Dr. Hauser, then a student at the University of Iowa, is at presentan English instructor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mary and Ambrose Manning, professors emeriti from East Tennessee State University, helped enormously with their reading and editing of the final manuscript as did William Irmscher, professor emeritusfrom the University of Washington in Seattle. Special mention goes to Ruth Christoffer Carlsen, who learned to use a computer so she could type and edit the manuscript from its inception through to the finished product. In the process, she probably read the manuscript more times and more thoroughly thananyone else. vii 6 L,. Introduction How does a person come to acquire a love for literature? Does one's love of literature come about because of an inherited trait, or because of environmental conditioning? Is it due to the kind of person one is, or is it brought about by the culture in which one grows up? When I began teaching college students, I could speculate only 'n terms of my own experience. My parents were both college graduates. They did read an occasional book, but their principal reading fare consisted of magazines, newspapers, and legal briefs. Each of the houses we lived in had a built-in bookcase about waist high on either side of the fireplace. These bookcases were adequate to contain a few gift books, some old college texts, The Book of Knowledge, the Bible, a dictionary, and an occasional contemporary novel. What, then, lured me toward reading and literature? Why did I become a leader while my two brothers, one older and one younger, did not (at least until fairly late in their lives) find the magic in books? I was always the "different one" in our family the odd man out so to speak so I assumed that my experiences with literature while growing up just represented some peculiarity in me. Therefore, I kept my experiences pretty much to myself. It never occurred to me to talk about this "idiosyncrasy" with anybody else. In college, I majored in English, not so much by design as by taking courses I liked. Eventually, my career led me to training secondary school English teachers and trying to help them make literature meaningful for the young people in their classes. One summer I was invited to teach English teachers in Hawaii. They were a mixture of native Hawaiians, first generation Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Portuguese as well as a handful of West Coast teachers about 60 students in all. Up to this point, I had spent my life largely around midwesterners, so this group in Hawaii seemed exotic, remote, and unique. Many had grown up on the pineapple and sugar plantations of the islands. Most had never known the confining quality of winter or the snug comfort of reading in front of a fireplace. To better understand their experience with books and reading, I asked them to write what I call d a "reading autobiography." In doing ix 4, x Voices of Readers so, they needed to reflect upon a number of questions. (What did they remember about learning to read? What books did they remember reading? Who, if anyone, had been important in developing their attitudes toward reading? When and where did they read?) What a surprise I had when I read the sixty papers. Although they came from very different backgrounds, both culturally and environmentally, the members of the group described experiences with books while growing up that were almost identical to my own in Minneapolis. After all, my experience was not unique. So from that time on, the reading autobiography became a regular part of my assignment; in "Literature for Adolescents!' My collection now numbers in th,. thousands and spans the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1930s. These voices from all parts of the country speak about their experiences with reading. I discovered that, given the chance, adults like to talk about their reading. In order to put this experience into words, one must force the mind to recollect forgotten but important memories of how one became a reader. Most people enjoy the process of exploring these memories. And most, like me, are astounded to see that their experience is not unique at all, but very common. In the process of discussing the autobiographies in class, the mem- ories of one person would stir kindred memories in another. "Oh," they would say, "I had forgotten about the Big Little books until you mentioned them I must have had all of them. I wonder what ever became of them?" (Those books that survived went into antique bookstores and are now collectors' items, with prices rising steadily as their pulp paper slowly disintegrate.) In general, this book presents the voices of people who are readers, people who were in classes at the University of Iowa, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Texas at Austin, University of Hawaii, or East Tennessee State University. They were overwhelmingly librarians or English teachers or were in training to becomeone or the other. Most were oriented toward reading. Only occasionally did a nonreader surface; usually, this person was a technocrat who was getting a library science degree, or a parent taking the course to see what was recommended for a teenage son or daughter, or a nurse fulfilling a pediatric requirement, or someone looking foran easy course. But the information they supplied is valuable as well. However, the majority were people who, as adults, had a committed interest in books and reading. Introduct;on xi The voices in these autobiographies tell us of being spellbound by reading, of where they found books to read, of their frustrations and their triumphs, of covert reading, of what happened to them in school classrooms and libraries, of life in their families and with their peers.