Who Makes Us Readers?
Who Makes Us Readers?
On discovering a passion for storytelling, reckoning with the devaluation of the humanities, and the people who help us along that journey.
One breezy summer day, after packing for a family trip, I wandered into my parents’ bedroom and found a book resting on my mother’s nightstand.
This was not unusual—there are, at any given moment, several books piled on my mother’s nightstand. But this volume instantly caught my eye. The cover featured an illustration of a black and white circus, perched in the palm of a woman’s hand. The circus teetered precariously. At any moment, with one slip of her fingers, the lofty clock tower and billowing tents would come crashing down. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
“Mom? Did you just buy this?”
At the sound of my voice, my mother emerged from her bathroom with a makeup bag in hand. “Buy what?”
I held up the curious volume.
“Oh, that. I got it for our trip.” She paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your summer reading for school?”
That was true. Summer break was nearly over, and I had only finished the first few chapters of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. I ran my fingers across the cover’s embossed title, imagining the groove of each silver star leaving a trail of stardust on my hand. “I was just looking.”
She smiled knowingly. “You can take a peek if you want.” With that, she left to continue packing her suitcase.
I brought The Night Circus to my bedroom and read the blurb on the back cover. A nocturnal circus, star-crossed lovers, a magicians’ duel… I glanced at my copy of The Awakening that sat abandoned on my desk, then back at the book in my hands. I could just read the first chapter.
My first mistake—the narration was spellbinding. “The circus arrives without warning,” indeed. Just a few more pages…
A few hours later, my mother appeared in the doorway. “Dinner’s ready—” She stopped, noticing the book in my hands.
I smiled sheepishly. “I’ll finish the reading for school on time. I promise.”
She laughed. “Okay, but that book is mine when we’re at the beach.”
“For what it’s worth, I can tell you that it’s really good.”
She laughed again. “I’m sure it is.”
Some readers are born, some are made. My mother’s own father passed away when she was young, but she remembers that he would stay up late many nights with a book in his hand. Carlos was his name. I never had the chance to meet him.
“You are just like him in that way,” she would tell me. “You used to put books under your pillow before bed.”
My mother took after her father, even though her time with him was short. She was always happiest at the library, shuttling my sister and me to the hallowed stacks after school. When she immigrated to the United States as a kid, her family didn’t have the budget to make frequent purchases at bookstores—certainly, not enough to keep up with my mom’s reading habits. But the library is free.
Some writers are born, some are made. When I was a toddler, I would frequently draw (very, um, abstract) images of fairies, princesses, witches, mermaids… and my mom would say, “Tell me the story of your drawing.” And I would. And she’d write it down for me.
My mother had strict rules about television in our household—absolutely no TV on a school night, and complaining isn’t going to change my mind! An ever-growing collection of notebooks became my closest companions. What else was there to do? The stories were already in my head.
As I grew older, I tried and gave up every sport under the sun, I eagerly participated in school drama programs, and I flirted with everything from bad photography to even worse fashion designs. But at every spare moment, when I was supposed to be doing my homework, I was writing.
“That’s what she’s going to do for a living,” my father would tell my mother.
“She still loves theater. She loves to perform.”
“Yeah, but what does she do in her free time?”
Other hobbies would come and go. Acting dwindled from a great passion into another activity on the to-do list. But the constant, through everything, was the writing.
My mother likes to say that I was born this way. But what would have become of me had I been raised in a different household? What if I was raised by a woman who didn’t care about reading, or worse, actively devalued the liberal arts? I came of age just as the tech industries reached their dominance, and the overwhelming message to young people was that the humanities didn’t matter. If you’re going to read, read self-help books. Maximize your productivity. But fiction is a waste of time.
There is something particularly soul-sucking about the devaluation of the humanities. In a way, it feels as if we are writing ourselves off as a species—a willing nosedive into the abyss. Now, I know how fortunate I was to be raised by someone who championed reading as an essential part of life. Perhaps I always possessed a natural inclination for storytelling, but without my mother’s enthusiasm, I wouldn’t be the reader and writer I am today.
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
Escaping to Elfland - On the legacy of portal fantasy in literature, from The Mabinogion to Lord Dunsany and C.S. Lewis. Read the full story here.
Standing On a Hill in My Mountain of Dreams - Thoughts on Romanticism, Led Zeppelin, and wandering with Caspar David Friedrich above a sea of fog. Read the full story here.
I grew up just prior to the tech revolution as well, and I think your insights about the state of the humanities are well-founded. We still see it today in how children are taught, what adults value and what we all choose to give our attention to. It can be pretty depressing.
Here's something I find interesting and perhaps a little hopeful, however:
"There is something particularly soul-sucking about the devaluation of the humanities. In a way, it feels as if we are writing ourselves off as a species—a willing nosedive into the abyss."
I figure we can go one of two ways: on the one hand, maybe this is just us turning into something more akin to a Vulcan race—where cultural knowledge is passed down through textbooks instead of stories. Which, y'know, might be cool after awhile. Warp drive and pointy ears might be neat.
But honestly, based on the evidence, I don't think we're capable. On the one hand, we're being taught to treat stories as entertainment, belief as superstition and that reality is only physical. But on the other, this train of thought is making us depressed. Even stranger, we're making up our own mythologies and beliefs anyway—in fact some of the most fantastical come from the rationalists who believe they're above that style of thinking.
I think we can't help ourselves, which means that on the one hand, the humanities are, fortunately, going to be sticking around. But on the other, it's dangerous indeed not to be deliberate about which stories and beliefs we choose to adopt and internalize. That's where I think the humanities needs to lean in more.