A Bad Case of Bookworms!

As I write this my wife is sprawled on a deckchair outside in the sun reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

I turn to look at her in a cute red bikini and the pair of pink sunglasses she bought on our honeymoon and my heart fills with pride. Not because I’m sure she is one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but because I’ve always found Austen to be such hard work.

I wonder if admiration is the right word if she’s having fun. The same novel was a setwork for my first year Varsity English, and I have to admit that about sixty pages in I stopped reading when I realised I had no idea what was going on.

Of course, I ended up watching the BBC movie in order to pass the exam.

So many people have told me they haven’t read one book since they left school; and there is always an odd note of pride when they say this, which I find peculiar.

Maybe it’s because the books I remember reading in school were either laboriously boring or way above our young heads.

In standard five, for instance, I remember the class being dragged through Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. Timeless classic it may be, but for a bunch of fourteen year olds it’s just a book about a geezer on a boat.

I also could never understand why the teacher would make every student read aloud. Up and down the desks we went, each having to follow as a classmate droned in tedious monotone with no respect for punctuation or pace.

In effect, I think school can kill any desire a young mind has for reading, and does more to promote the belief that books are boring. What we need is not for our educators to stuff classics down our throats, but for them to nurture a love of prose so that we eventually find our way to respectable literature.

As parents we also have a duty towards our children. My mum might have dashed my hopes when I dumped Castle Grayskull in the shopping trolley, but a request for a book was never refused.

My sentimental mum a while back dug out a massive packing box she’d kept for over twenty-five years full of books from my childhood. Every ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ and Roald Dahl was there, as well as a few Beano annuals, and a collection of shorter works dubiously entitled ‘The Gay Way Series’.

But that was back when ‘gay’ meant ‘happy’ and the books did not in any way promote good dress sense or espouse the merits of Abba. And they should make us happy, not make us wish the bell would ring so we could run around throwing a tennis ball at our peers.

I can only thank mum and dad for not skimping on the books. It is the reason I am never bored on the train, in a queue, and it is the reason I’m sitting here writing – books are an inspiration.

Maybe when Lucy’s finished that intimidating Jane Austen I’ll have a go.