Reading Writers Victoria’s e-newsletter (@writersvictoria) and saw this advice from Australian author Natalie Rose Dyer: “Writing is a privilege, it’s for people rich in time, but most of us have to work for a living. So make a schedule, be disciplined – stick with it. Take back your creativity! It will save your life.”
I feel reading is the same. A colleague recently said to me: “I wish I could read as much as you!” I was also told a while ago that the way I do a post each day about reading and writing may lead people to think that I live a privileged life and have so much time on my hands. I suppose I do, to some degree, but that doesn’t mean I don’t struggle to find time for reading and writing about reading.
I am a firm believer in literacy as a fundamental human right, not a privilege, and there should be universal access to it. However, reading is not the same as literacy, because those who can read can choose not to, and they are entitled to their choice. It is just like that saying: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” You might even get kicked in the guts if you force it.
While reading is a privilege, I think there is also some ambiguity about what “reading” means. There are many different ways to read, and even more types of reading materials for people to enjoy, and they read for different reasons. Just because someone hasn’t touched a fiction or non-fiction book for a period of time, doesn’t mean they haven’t read anything at all.
Anyway… Found a quote about reading that led me to British author Chris Whitaker’s highly-acclaimed 2024 novel All the Colours of the Dark. But here is an even better quote, from American academic and author Robert Alter:
“Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.”
(Day 82 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 