Kicking the habit?

When your library is in storage and your partner has made various threats about the establishment of a new one, your reading needs have to be satisfied by new approaches.

Having seen Ruskin’s dictum, “If a book is worth reading it’s worth buying” at a very early stage in my development and taken its message very much to heart, my first inclination in reading something new is to buy the book. This must be music to the ears of publishers, but in my present circumstances my instincts must be curbed. The impulsive purchase must be restrained and other methods of satisfying my addiction (because that is what reading is for me) must be used.

Before anyone suggests cold turkey; that is not a thinkable way forward. I remember once my parents asked me to put the dog’s food in her dish. Like a dutiful child I disappeared into the kitchen and did as I was told. I then failed to reappear for some time. When my mother came into the kitchen to find out where I was she found me squatting down by the side of the feeding dog reading the newspaper underneath the dog’s dish.

I think it was at that point that she gave up on the concept of my bedroom looking anything less than a second hand bookshop.

Somerset Maughan once wrote a short story called I think ‘The Book Bag’ and in that story the narrator travels around with a bag of books to satisfy his needs and he says that if there is nothing else then the telephone directory is better reading than no reading! I thought this was a piece of narrative invention until once I found myself doing exactly the same (and it’s amazing how interesting a telephone directory can be!) This is an addiction stretching back over most of my life. The person to blame is my father who taught me to read.

There are many different approaches towards teaching young children how to read. These different approaches all have their positive points and differ depending on the education fashions at the time. Child centred; look and say; phonetics; ita; flash cards; paired reading: all of them have their adherents. All of these approaches have one thing in common – they try and bring the child into the learning process and make the child an enthusiastic partner in the education and development of reading skill.

My father’s approach was slightly different. He had, he told me much later, asked me when I was very young, if I wanted to learn to read. I was disinclined. He repeated his question at regular intervals, but, alas, I did not evince any real enthusiasm to gain this new skill. The reasonable child centred approach having failed, my father, a highly professional, experienced teacher, tried another approach – one that was a little more directed.

He sat me on his knee and in spite of my tearful pleas for mercy forced me to work my way through some form of Janet and John books by holding me in a half nelson and ignoring my aversion to his teaching methods.

In later years, when I was a teacher of English my father used to taunt me by saying, “My methods certainly put you off reading, didn’t it?” He ever had a certain sense of irony!

So the reading quota has to be kept up and, although the solution of my supply problem may seem absurdly obvious to some, it took me a while to realise that there was a dealer for my drug within easy distance of my home. The library!

Now, I’ve said before that the purchasing ethos of my local library seems to be to supply modern literature through recently published books and not care about providing a ‘balanced’ version of ‘The Great Tradition.’ Having the books that I want to read, therefore, would seem to be a problem.

Having used Inter Library Loan years ago now was my chance to see if this service, too, was a thing of the past.

I am delighted to report that Inter Library Loan is alive and well and producing books within a week! Admittedly, ‘Oliver Twist’ was not exactly a hard test for availability. I hope to extend the resources of the service in the following months. But as for the present, I am impressed with the service.

My habit can continue!