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[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
( The importance of abstracted communication and the codex form )
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I gave been part of the community of people who read from a very young age, and of reading books when I get the opportunity to do so. Memory doesn't go back all the way to the beginning, but I do know there was a set of Sweet Pickles books in the household and those got read aloud with me, and that I likely read them aloud as well. The practice in my childhood home involved a lot of reading aloud, and repetition of certain books down the line of siblings (I think all of us are very well-versed in Frank Asch's Turtle Tale) as we learned how to translate between graphs and phonemes and back again, until we had the knack of it and were let loose in the public library's collection, as well as accumulating a bookshelf's worth of material of our own. Or very nearly such - there were grownup books on the same shelves as the kids ones. Book fair sales usually meant adding a couple of paperbacks from the limited selection available.
Surprisingly enough, my parents did not attempt to regulate my choices of reading material, when that reading material was clearly fiction. I read an awful lot of stories involving wizards, magicians, swords, demons, evil, gods, and the like. And played computer games of the same sort, and went through the various gamebooks that were in vogue at the time. (I didn't get into tabletop role-playing games, but PC and console ones, since I didn't live places where my powers could easily get together and do such things, and Internet access was still not broadband for a large chunk of my childhood and adolescence.) It was at the point where I started doing research into the nonfiction aspects of neopaganism that my parents began to disapprove of my reading choices. (They're practicing Catholics, I don't blame them for concern, but i do blame them for how they went about it.) Through that, however, I learned the value of having backup methods, and that my librarians were not broadcasting to everyone what was being checked out from their spaces. And, although I didn't encounter the source quote until later, that networks, especially networks with librarians, tend to see censorship as damage and route around it. As plenty of places are discovering, you can ban a book from your physical space, but they doesn't actually remove access to it except for those people who don't have a workaround, or a friend with a workaround. (As for neopaganism, it got added to my knowledge store, and with time and aging, I think I understand many of the things I read before better now. It may not ever result in any kind of practice, but I am a perpetually curious outsider willing to see and get explanations for what gets made public.)
The desire to read through entire series also helped me get comfortable with the requests system and the interlibrary loan systems. Regular library trips were always part of the deal, and even more so in summer. This came from the privilege of having one parent staying at home throughout my childhood, a situation increasingly denied to many children. Voracious reading meant both ILL and expanding the sections of the library I was allowed to roam, such that I was plucking material from the adult audience sections well before becoming a chronological adult. At university, a lot of my reading shifted over to academic material and reading things on webpages, a situation that has not changed significantly once leaving university and becoming employed. I do still have time for print books, even thigh it's easier to squeeze graphic novels and manga into the gaps of time where I can take in a book. And, if it isn't obvious, I do a fair amount more writing in these years than I did when I was in schooling, so that also takes up time I could be reading. (As does all of the additional cruft, overhead, and requirements of being a functional adult with a job and a house and other such things. They being me joy and aggravation, but they provide benefits that are generally with their costs.)
People who saw my book habits and my reading would say they were unsurprised at my choice of working in libraries, but most of the reasoning behind that is unsound. I will get into that in a later entry in this series. For this one, the part of my work that is in recommending books and materials to others is about building that community of people who read, view, listen, and otherwise engage with the words and works of others. The part of me that provides books, songs, rhymes, and social time for the very small, does so with the idea and the hope that these kids and their grownups will start and continue in the community of those who read and enjoy books and narrative, even if the medium of that reading doesn't look like the codex that I grew up with. You'll often hear S.R. Ranganathan quoted by librarians, with a pair of his laws of library science, each a mirror of the other: every book its reader, every reader their book. All the things that are written are for an audience, even if the audience is one, maybe two. All the readers of the world have at least one thing that they will be profoundly moved by the reading of. Lucky readers have many books, lucky books have many readers, but one of the things that makes a community of readers go is the freedom to chose which book to try, and the freedom to reject the book you've selected and go get another. Or to change your reading and interpretation of the text so that you get something out of it, even if the author yells at you that you are "interpreting this text from the wrong perspective." The community of readers is always looking for one more of those stories, books, scrolls, pages, articles, that will invoke the desired feeling, the desired learning, the thing that is best for right now (and maybe for the future.) The community of readers wants to share the things that have affected them profoundly in the hope that you, too, will be affected, and through your shared affection, you can get to know each other and the text better.
I would like to do more reading, honestly. And all the other things that I want to be able to do, if only I weren't limited by the passage of time, and that I can't repeat time that's already happened.
( The importance of abstracted communication and the codex form )
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I gave been part of the community of people who read from a very young age, and of reading books when I get the opportunity to do so. Memory doesn't go back all the way to the beginning, but I do know there was a set of Sweet Pickles books in the household and those got read aloud with me, and that I likely read them aloud as well. The practice in my childhood home involved a lot of reading aloud, and repetition of certain books down the line of siblings (I think all of us are very well-versed in Frank Asch's Turtle Tale) as we learned how to translate between graphs and phonemes and back again, until we had the knack of it and were let loose in the public library's collection, as well as accumulating a bookshelf's worth of material of our own. Or very nearly such - there were grownup books on the same shelves as the kids ones. Book fair sales usually meant adding a couple of paperbacks from the limited selection available.
Surprisingly enough, my parents did not attempt to regulate my choices of reading material, when that reading material was clearly fiction. I read an awful lot of stories involving wizards, magicians, swords, demons, evil, gods, and the like. And played computer games of the same sort, and went through the various gamebooks that were in vogue at the time. (I didn't get into tabletop role-playing games, but PC and console ones, since I didn't live places where my powers could easily get together and do such things, and Internet access was still not broadband for a large chunk of my childhood and adolescence.) It was at the point where I started doing research into the nonfiction aspects of neopaganism that my parents began to disapprove of my reading choices. (They're practicing Catholics, I don't blame them for concern, but i do blame them for how they went about it.) Through that, however, I learned the value of having backup methods, and that my librarians were not broadcasting to everyone what was being checked out from their spaces. And, although I didn't encounter the source quote until later, that networks, especially networks with librarians, tend to see censorship as damage and route around it. As plenty of places are discovering, you can ban a book from your physical space, but they doesn't actually remove access to it except for those people who don't have a workaround, or a friend with a workaround. (As for neopaganism, it got added to my knowledge store, and with time and aging, I think I understand many of the things I read before better now. It may not ever result in any kind of practice, but I am a perpetually curious outsider willing to see and get explanations for what gets made public.)
The desire to read through entire series also helped me get comfortable with the requests system and the interlibrary loan systems. Regular library trips were always part of the deal, and even more so in summer. This came from the privilege of having one parent staying at home throughout my childhood, a situation increasingly denied to many children. Voracious reading meant both ILL and expanding the sections of the library I was allowed to roam, such that I was plucking material from the adult audience sections well before becoming a chronological adult. At university, a lot of my reading shifted over to academic material and reading things on webpages, a situation that has not changed significantly once leaving university and becoming employed. I do still have time for print books, even thigh it's easier to squeeze graphic novels and manga into the gaps of time where I can take in a book. And, if it isn't obvious, I do a fair amount more writing in these years than I did when I was in schooling, so that also takes up time I could be reading. (As does all of the additional cruft, overhead, and requirements of being a functional adult with a job and a house and other such things. They being me joy and aggravation, but they provide benefits that are generally with their costs.)
People who saw my book habits and my reading would say they were unsurprised at my choice of working in libraries, but most of the reasoning behind that is unsound. I will get into that in a later entry in this series. For this one, the part of my work that is in recommending books and materials to others is about building that community of people who read, view, listen, and otherwise engage with the words and works of others. The part of me that provides books, songs, rhymes, and social time for the very small, does so with the idea and the hope that these kids and their grownups will start and continue in the community of those who read and enjoy books and narrative, even if the medium of that reading doesn't look like the codex that I grew up with. You'll often hear S.R. Ranganathan quoted by librarians, with a pair of his laws of library science, each a mirror of the other: every book its reader, every reader their book. All the things that are written are for an audience, even if the audience is one, maybe two. All the readers of the world have at least one thing that they will be profoundly moved by the reading of. Lucky readers have many books, lucky books have many readers, but one of the things that makes a community of readers go is the freedom to chose which book to try, and the freedom to reject the book you've selected and go get another. Or to change your reading and interpretation of the text so that you get something out of it, even if the author yells at you that you are "interpreting this text from the wrong perspective." The community of readers is always looking for one more of those stories, books, scrolls, pages, articles, that will invoke the desired feeling, the desired learning, the thing that is best for right now (and maybe for the future.) The community of readers wants to share the things that have affected them profoundly in the hope that you, too, will be affected, and through your shared affection, you can get to know each other and the text better.
I would like to do more reading, honestly. And all the other things that I want to be able to do, if only I weren't limited by the passage of time, and that I can't repeat time that's already happened.
