Toe in the Water

Jethro Tull and the Great God Literacy

Jethro Tull and the Great God Literacy

Suddenly everyone wants to know what I have been reading, am reading and am going to read. I dodged the question yesterday by pointing at a book that I re-read to assist in completing a WdC Challenge and another that I am going to re-read for an upcoming Challenge. But the truth is really that I read everything.

Every day we are presented with myriads of short exhortations, advertisements and snippets of writing on the things around us. Can you resist reading them? I certainly can’t. The reading urge seizes on the most mundane piece of text, even when we know what it’s going to say, and begins to read. It is a compulsion that accompanies the ability to read. As soon as we can read with a little fluency, our eyes know what to do with text and our minds take the controls to make us read, like it or not.

I was going to wax lyrical on the stolen hours sat on the great white throne, reading anything we can reach, but I’ll spare you that. Just the mention of it should make you realise that I’m right. We read and read and read, even if we’ve never read a book in our lives. It is like oxygen to the ability to read and very few of us retain the ability to breathe in the vacuum of illiteracy.

And that is a heck of a thought (no, I don’t swear when it’s not necessary - I told you I’m a dinosaur). If I may mangle Ian Anderson a little, “Our wise men don’t know how it feels to be illiterate.” That’s the thing about literacy, you see. Once we’ve got it, we can’t imagine not having it. And it would take quite a clout on the head to get rid of it. Even that would only work in one case in a hundred, I’d guess.

It’s a question that exposes the infinite gamble that is life - “What are you reading this weekend?”


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