A Plea for Reading: Introducing our Book Club, “Buy Your Own Coffee” (B.Y.O.C.)
by Les
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the art and skill of reading. Perhaps this was brought on by Henry David Thoreau’s prescriptions for happiness in Walden. Here he criticizes the things many people usually consider important: material things at the expense of the invisible essentials, for example technological conveniences without substance, fashionable clothing without the improvement of the person wearing them, and the like. I found myself agreeing vigorously about some of the things he identified as sources of authentic happiness, and which are usually obtained practically for free. There is closeness to Nature, the revelations of the present moment, and not least, reading the classics. In the chapter entitled “Reading,” Thoreau writes,
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. (My italics.)
My ongoing love affair with Thoreau is culminating this term, when I am teaching his book for the second time in a course at La Salle called Great Works. (Next term, I’m moving on to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and mentor who was also a great advocate of reading.) Given the harried trimestral system at school, and the so-called “transformative” pedagogy that is doing away with the traditional subject-matter-centered teaching, introducing students to Thoreau has been a contradictory experience. I have to present his powerful ideas in a milieu that seems to embody the very assumptions that he inveighs against. Not surprisingly, I’m often ranting in class about our seeming preference for breadth as opposed to depth, for the well-packaged but superficial presentation, for so-called well-roundedness as opposed to mastery.
These preferences reflect the general ethos of the Information Revolution, the digital era of “Generation Y,” a.k.a. the Age of the Short Attention Span. In fact, I’m reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and as the tone of the title suggests, the news isn’t good. Carr cites studies indicating that, due to the influence of changing media, the reading skills of people–even those belonging to the older generations–are suffering. The author himself confesses that he could barely read two pages of a regular book now without his mind wandering, deprived of the usual overstimulaton from gadgets or the TV. Of course, one may argue that the medium itself is neutral, that it is the purposes to which we put it that determine its usefulness or perniciousness. But the medium does matter, and in his book Carr outlines its inevitable consequences for the human brain. Referencing Marshall McLuhan’s classic Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he writes,
in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. (Source: Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows [Kindle Locations 99-101]. W. W. Norton & Company. My italics.)
Proof of this is how rare it is now for me to find a student who actually reads. Oh, people read plenty, but mostly what they read doesn’t qualify as “reading” in the sense that I am using. They read text messages, Facebook statuses, random billboard ads while driving along Edsa, or the hodgepodge of institutional information flashing on the “Green TV” at the elevator bank on the ground floor of the Yuchengco Building. You know what I mean. Let’s be more charitable and assume some people read Dan Brown, Nicholas Sparks, J.K. Rowling, or Stephanie Meyer–i.e. if they haven’t already seen the movie version of their, er… “books.”
The deterioration of our reading skills severely affects our thinking and communication skills. For example, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, in her recent Philippines Free Press article, “How Does One Become a Writer?”, draws a link between the ability to read and the ability to write. Writers from Generation Y seem to be cut off from the literary tradition. Unfortunately, unless the skills of reading are instilled in a person early, it would be hard to develop them as an adult, or even to develop as an adult. This is bad news for us college educators, that even the privileged few lucky enough to get to college–and into La Salle, no less–don’t know how, or are not inclined to, really read. Little wonder that one of my most frustrating moments is when I’m reading students’ trivial or barely coherent essays. As a biographer of the American Transcendentalists writes,
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing;” Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.” (Source: Robert D. Richardson. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process [Kindle Locations 57-58]. Kindle Edition.)
These depressing ruminations have propelled me to do an impromptu research on the art and skill of reading, and on books about books. I have recently reviewed Alberto Manguel’s delightful A History of Reading and Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book. On top of my to-be-read pile now are The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, and How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom. Apart from these books being useful for our Great Works courses, I am thinking of incorporating them in a series of mini-lectures for our book club, ”Buy Your Own Coffee” (B.Y.O.C.)
This book club, started by my colleague Mark Anthony Dacela, is open to the public and holds free sessions. Our first session was held earlier this year on Michel Foucault’s three-volume History of Sexuality. Our next session is on Dante’s Inferno, scheduled on September 17 at Cafe Breton in Mall of Asia. If you are interested in participating, you may join our Facebook group and confirm your attendance of the next session here. Our rules are simple:
1. You must read the book up for discussion.
2. You can vote for the next classic or contemporary work of literature to be discussed.
3. Buy your own coffee–or tea, as the case may be. 
Our book club members are mostly from La Salle, students of mine and my colleagues.’ However, students from other schools and even professionals have previously joined us.
I enjoin anyone who loves reading to support B.Y.O.C. and to extend this invitation to their friends. I hope to see you in our next session, start a tradition, and inspire a reading revolution, in the spirit of Thoreau and Emerson!
