Reading

My love of English and how it developed

Ever since I was four years old, I’ve been reading books non-stop every day. I started school when I was that age, and a month later my teacher had to “have a word” with my mum because I couldn’t do phonics. Every other child had been in nursery and had been learning phonics since they were two. I hadn’t been to nursery; I’d learnt to read using Peter and Jane, then graduated onto Charlie and Lola, and by the time I started school I could read My Naughty Little Sister and The Famous Five. My mum explained to my teacher that I’d never learnt phonics, but that I could read chapter books like these. She had assumed that, after I’d been in her class for a month, the teacher might have noticed this. The teacher hadn’t noticed this, however, and was instead concerned that I didn’t know what a diphthong was. After my mum told her I could read, she did some tests on me, and came back to my mum saying she had no idea what to do with me because I was so much further ahead than the others.

Before I started school, I used to love reading. I would take a stack of books and, like Jane Eyre in her window-seat, sit myself on the mat by the patio door, close the dining-room curtain and happily work my way through them for hours on end. After I’d been in school for just a few weeks, I would come home and cry and refuse to do any kind of reading. If my mum did manage to persuade me to pick up a book, I would explain to her that I wasn’t allowed to just read what the words were because I had to “sound them out” first. My mum took me out of school a month later and I’ve been reading unrestricted ever since!

Another thing that I would have had to endure if I’d stayed at school is English class. Every weekday for the last ten years, I would have had to sit through lessons about where to put apostrophes and how to make a noun more interesting by adding an adjective. As it is, I have never had a single lesson in how to write. I’ve never had a spelling test, or had to fill in a worksheet; indeed, I think that if that had been the case, I wouldn’t like reading and writing anywhere near as much as I do now. For the majority of my childhood I’ve had free rein when it comes to writing. My parents used to tell me to stop writing my story and go and play outside like a normal child. My English lessons consisted of reading my favourite books, being read to, planning my stories, writing them, drawing the characters. My parents nurtured the love for writing and reading that they saw in me, and knew that if they tried to drill vowels and consonants into me, that love would quickly fade. As it is, it has only increased, and to this day I spend hour upon hour writing stories, blog posts and presentations. I know that my future career will be something in this area, but I might easily have despised English if my lessons had been anything like school ones.

Why reading is so important

The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.

Albert Einstein

I wouldn’t have magically learnt how to write without having read a lot of books. I live by the motto “If you can’t find what you want to read, write it,” but I can’t do that if I don’t have some kind of influence or inspiration from other authors, or the vocabulary that they used while writing. Different authors have different styles, and by reading as many books as I can, I can incorporate all of those styles into my own unique one. After reading a book, I write my review, thus using all the new skills and words I learnt from it, and adding to the vast accumulation of knowledge that, I believe, everyone gains after reading a good piece of literature. (You can follow my Goodreads account here!)

People are going to judge you on everything that you write, whether that’s a job or college application or a review – anything and everything from a novel to this blog post. I hope that when I’ve “finished” my education, I’ll be able to write well. Writing well doesn’t mean copying someone else’s ideas, or regurgitating what York Notes says about some famous book.

“There’s no such thing as a bad book” seems to be the prevailing wisdom among teachers and parents alike these days. I vehemently disagree! If you go into the teenage section of the library nowadays and pick any of the books available, you can predict with 99% accuracy what it’s about. That’s because almost all modern “young adult” fiction is about teenagers having teenage issues. All the characters have some form of depression or anxiety or family problems, and this idea that every piece of fiction needs to be “relatable” is vacuous and condescending.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Oscar Wilde

Do children really prefer to read about John Green’s Hazel Lancaster and the “toxic” relationship she’s in with her beautiful boyfriend than about Edmond Dantes escaping from the Chateau d’If and rescuing damsels in distress? They certainly didn’t fifty years ago – in fact, there was no such thing as “young adult” fiction then! You don’t need to be an adult to enjoy PG Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Why are schools so intent on giving children Michael Morpurgo when there is so much amazing literature on offer?

Of course, if you want to show yourself what it is you’re missing out on, you could read some samey, modern sci-fi story like Divergent. But the fact is, there are so many books and so little time! Once you’ve read one of these modern novels, you don’t need to read any more because they’re all the same. In contrast, all the classics in the Western Canon are different in some way or another, and each offers its own philosophy, writing style, message or fascinating new concept.

In any case, my goal is to read everything from Gilgamesh to Fahrenheit 451, and waste no time at all on Hunger Games and Twilight.

Great Books curriculum

I will be using Susan Wise Bauer’s incredibly helpful books The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home and The Well-Educated Mind, along with Harold Bloom’s Western Canon and Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, as well as reading lists from St John’s College and Harvard Classics. I plan to read all of the Great Books listed in these works over the course of my life, but I needed to narrow it down a bit and create a list to study for the next few years. My mum and I have devised our own reading plan using these as a guide, only including the (many!) books we think are most important or beneficial to read, and leaving out any that aren’t suitable yet or which I might get more out of when I’m a bit older. I’m going to read my way steadily through the Canon from the works of the Ancient Greeks to the present day, perfectly systematically and chronologically because I like it that way.

The goal of this reading plan, though, is not to race my way through as many books as possible. It’s to read each book slowly and methodically, taking notes and analysing the language, exploring the new concepts and considering the questions that arise, and, in general, learning exactly what it was that this particular author was proposing. I’ll be reading historical books, biographies, poetry, plays and, of course, novels. Below is the list of all the books I plan to read this year, and as I read them I’ll add the links to my analyses. I’ll also post all my book reviews and analyses on my Facebook page.

Reading List 2021 (Age 14)

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

George Orwell