The Private Reading Experience
It was a chilly day in the early spring of 2002 when a navy blue school bus drove up a hill and screeched to a halt outside an urbanization of modern, white, blocky houses. Students began filing out of the bus, finally a small blonde girl wearing baggy jeans and a Green Bay Packers t-shirt took the last two steps at a hop, rounded the corner, and skipped the three blocks to her very own white cube. She ran into the kitchen, grabbed a bag of Doritos and a juice box and bounded up the steps to her room. The little blonde girl threw the bag of chips on her bed, put the juice on the night stand and stood in front of her bookshelf, contemplating which Harry Potter book would be best suited for this day. She paused briefly before snatching the third installment of the series: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. With the three hundred-page story tucked under her arm, she pulled back the checkered comforter and crawled in. She placed the book on her lap, pulled open the bag of Doritos, pierced the straw into the juice box, and turned the cover to unveil the pages stained from the dozens of times they had been read. As she read the first couple of words she forgot about any problems that she was experiencing at school or at home and delved deep into the magical world of wizards, giants, elves, and vanishing staircases. This blonde girl snuggled beneath the covers with her nose in this childhood classic was I. Sven Birkets argues in his book The Gutenberg Elegies that reading is a private experience. While I don’t completely agree, as I think that reading and writing can be useful tools of communication, I do agree that reading can be an intensely personal journey.
There are two different forms of reading and writing, in my mind: there are creative stories and there are factual documents. To say that all reading is a private experience is naïve and incorrect; reading literature may be a private experience for some, but newspapers and essays are, not only meant to be a public experience, but are put to their best use when discussed in a group setting. Reading a novel, such as Harry Potter is, at least in my mind, a private experience. For me, delving into the realm of Harry Potter was a way to escape reality and travel into a world that was completely different from my own. Many children implore their parents to read to them; they ask for a bedtime story as they snuggle beneath the covers while a parent sits at the foot of the bed telling the child stories of monsters and princesses, each character allotted a specific voice and expression. I was not one of those children; I disapproved of the high squeaky voice my mother assigned to Hermione, for I knew that her voice was level and even-toned. I rejected the way my father would insert a hint of panic into Harry’s intonation, for he was a brave character: one who did not lose his nerve. And most of all I abhorred the concept that anyone, other than myself, had the ability to experience this magical land that, in my mind, was privy to only me. When an outsider would read Harry Potter to me all of the sudden it wouldn’t be the Hogwarts I had come to know and love, it was a different setting with altered characters who were unfamiliar to me.
For many, reading serves as an escape; turning page after page of a story in a far away land with characters who the reader has never personally met before, while simultaneously feeling a connection to this character that rivals any bond between real people. This escape is impossible to experience when shared with multiple readers; it is unfeasible to delve deep into another realm when a peer is sharing this experience with you. When I would come home from school and crawl into bed, my friend or school problems would cease to exist, and had anyone else taken part in the Harry Potter experience I would not have been able to make the full escape I strived for.
While, personally, I believe that reading novels is best experienced privately, I also believe that there is a time and place for public reading. Newspapers and Propaganda, for example, are incredibly useful ways of conveying ideas. For thousands of years people have been using writing as a way to communicate with the masses and attempt to persuade people to see things in a certain light. Hitler used his book, Mien Kampf, as a platform for his political journey that resulted in the most powerful and destructive dictatorship of all time. Mein Kampf, or ‘my struggle’ in English, was an autobiography while simultaneously describing Hitler’s political ideology. This text became the ‘Nazi Bible’ with about 10 million copies of the book sold; this volume became the starting point for Hitler’s Nazi regime. Without this book being publicly read and discussed Hitler’s ideas would never have surfaced to the extent that they did, meaning that the Second World War may have never occurred. While the rise of Hitler is, obviously, not a positive thing, there is little doubt that Nazi books and propaganda played a large part in it’s temporary success.
Nazi’s are not the only ones to use writing as a form of communication, newspapers and essays are common forms of exchanging ideas. Newspapers such as The New York Times use reporters and photographers to collect ideas and news and transfer them to the general public. News and Ideas are best understood when talked about in a group. For example, in a classroom setting students are encouraged to speak about the material they have been assigned to read and share their thoughts and feelings on the subject.
Reading can be both a private and public experience based on the type of writing in question. A novel, in my opinion, is a private experience that is often best enjoyed alone, an escape provided by external worlds that the reader is thrust into, while newspaper articles or nonfiction writing can be better enjoyed as a public form of communication. Both types of writing are valuable to society, however personally I enjoy the private journey of reading a novel more than the public experience of reading nonfiction and news articles.
The Private Reading Experience: Revised
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