The Art of Reading Chunks

It has its place -- but not in The Atlantic (or Slate!)

I noticed, while the Renaissance Son was in elementary school a surprising lack of assigned books. He had hours of math homework and detailed reading assignments that were usually essays, articles and very occasionally short fiction, but he was not educated, as I was, with the idea that you start off reading short picture books, gradate to longer books with illustrations and chapters, and then books without the illustrations and then The Odyssey.

Fortunately, The Renaissance Son chose to read books on his own. But I remember the books coming home from school, too. The Boxcar Children, in second grade, for example, where the teacher would read to us in class and then we would read on our own (in class, we didn’t have elementary school homework) until we all got through the story together. Once you did that, it was no problem to pick up Black Beauty (my first chapter book) or Tom Sawyer on your own.

These days, elementary school kids are reading the way adults do — shorter pieces, often on a laptop or tablet with an internet connection. Apparently, this persists into high school and now college professors are noticing that the young adults they are teaching have had no practice reading books. These professors are now complaining about it in Slate and The Atlantic, two publications that still host professorial complaints. I am sympathetic and write frequently here about how I wish our society valued literature more highly.

I am also sympathetic to these students as reading is a learned skill more than it is an act of will. You need techniques to to get through 500 pages about an ancient civilization like The Iliad, not to mentioned the names and nomenclature of Russian literature and the nuances of Franz Kafka or Thomas Pynchon that make you wonder how something so short can be so challenging.

If you were really never expected to read books, you could only react with horror at having Gravity’s Rainbow dropped on your foot. I don’t know if pedagogy has an answer here (if I did, this would be in The Atlantic) but I suspect it could all be cured if today’s boys and girls would take John Waters’ advice and just not sleep with people who don’t read books. Hey, I’ll expand on this — whatever you’re into, if they won’t groom, tidy, cook and read, don’t fuck them. Refusing to do any one of those things should be a dealbreaker. That’s my PSA.

Back to the subject — last time I Middlebrowed about this, a reader pointed me to The Reader’s Digest as an awesome middlebrow publication that brought people without the time or skills the tastes and flavors of great and contemporary literature, to get them going. It was kind of an amuse-mente, an appetizer for the soul, if you will. It was never intended as the a whole cerebral feast, but it got folks to the table.

There’s also another solution, quite literary, from our friends at Penguin:

I always believed in the Joseph Campbell method reading — when you find an author you like, read all of their work. But this isn’t always possible if you want to read widely. Friedrich Nietzsche was a prolific philosopher. Saul Bellow wrote a lot of fiction. Dorothy Parker wrote a lot of essays and stories and reviews in far flung places. I used to collect from this Portable Series and yes, that meant I read in chunks. The Portable Bellow had some of the shorter novels like Seize the Day included entirely, but there were also bits and pieces from throughout his career and you wound up with a good sense of the guy as an artist without having to be a completist.

I notice that Penguin’s portable series is a lot smaller than it used to be, which seems to be the way of publishing. But there’s a lot of good stuff there and they might be the bridge for young people schooled on chunks to build the stamina to go cover-to-cover.

Another series I collected, that seems to be out of print, were “The Beginner’s Guide To…” which were comic books (I mean, “graphic novels,” ahem) about writers like Ernest Hemingway, philosophers like Jacques Lacan and whole movements like Post-Structuralism. They were excellent prep materials for the texts to follow because they very quickly showed you what to look for as you delved into the study.

So, the answer to the problem of young people and books is to give them more accessible books that will help them past the title pages of what’s assigned. It’s not a new idea at all. It’s how I learned to read. Picture books. Longer books with chapters and illustrations. More complex books without the illustrations. Kurt Vonnegut, in there, somewhere.

We can solve for this. Even in 2024.