Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries and Community

Citation

Ray, S. (2007), "Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries and Community", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 87-88. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710722113

This book is dedicated to Margaret Meek, long‐established British expert in the field of reading, and although it was published in the USA, what it says is valid throughout the English‐speaking world. The primary audience is visualised as consisting of librarians and students of librarianship but the book should also be appreciated by parents, teachers and other adults who are interested in reading.

It is essential to encourage and support the habit of reading for pleasure. A high proportion of people can read and understand the printed word but only a small percentage can use texts at a more complex level, and being literate in our modern society means being thoroughly at home in a world permeated by texts – job application forms, manuals, maps, menus, labels on food and advertising, for example. Good reading skills are only acquired through practice and this is where reading for pleasure comes in – it motivates people to develop their basic skills and, once acquired, to continue to use them. I recall that 30 odd years ago, when teaching children and young people how to use library resources effectively first became fashionable, an American school librarian, Margaret Edwards, made this very point.

We therefore need to celebrate the fact that a major function of public and school libraries is to circulate books for leisure reading. Despite cheap paperbacks, there are still many people who cannot afford to buy all the books they want to read for enjoyment. When we complain about non‐readers, we are in fact often complaining that people do not read the books that we think they should read. Reading Matters recommends that libraries get rid of the distinction between popular culture and high culture and that librarians look around to see if there is anything in their library that suggests to readers that romances and westerns, for example, are only read by second class citizens.

Reading Matters contains detailed reports of surveys and research in the field. This makes for very dense reading and few readers will read every word – it thus demonstrates very clearly the advantages of being literate enough to be able to skim a text selectively! The various stages of development – Childhood, Young Adults and Adult – are treated in separate chapters. It mentions many of the books that have influenced my own thinking about reading over the last 30 years such as Dorothy Butler's Cushla and Her Books, Esther Jane Carrier's Fiction in Public Libraries, 1876‐1900, Margaret Clark's Young Fluent Readers, Richard Altick's The English Common Reader, Margaret Meek's Learning to Read and The Reading Environment by Richard D. Altick. Charles Sarland's Young People and Reading is described as “one of the best studies of popular literature preferences of young adults”. It even goes back to Queenie Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public, published in 1932.

Inevitably there are glimpses of the obvious for anyone who has done much work in this field – “banning” makes books popular, males tend to read less fiction than females but are more likely to read non‐fiction for pleasure, popular series and magazines are widely read although often discounted. The increasing number of author societies for adults who recall certain authors whose books they read when children with great pleasure and still wish to read and talk about them is a good sign of the value of popular authors. Who would have thought in the days when William and Biggles books and titles by Enid Blyton and Frank Richards were banned from many public libraries that in the 21st century there would be societies in their honour, not to mention those that appreciate the work of writers of girls’ stories, pony stories and the popular camping and tramping stories of the 1930s and 1940s, which have been largely ignored in the histories of children's literature? There are two indexes, one of names and subjects, the other of titles.

I found this one of the most stimulating books about librarianship that I have read for a long time; every public library should buy a copy and actively promote it amongst their staff!