"I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson
I really love to read. It's perhaps my favorite thing to do. But with graduate school I often don't read for fun very much. Don't get me wrong, I certainly enjoy most of the readings that I do for school, even when I don't agree with the reading. But, there's something about choosing a book and reading it for no purpose except my own.
Photo from barnesandnoble.com
This week I took time to read Insurgent by Veronica Roth. I read her first book in the series, Divergent, in about two days. I'd like to read Insurgent at the same pace, but due to a big statistics test this week and lots and lots and lots of grading, I'm only getting to read a bit here and there. But I still love it! I get to escape into the world of the story and forget about my worries and problems.
I'm always amazed when people say that they don't like to read. But I have to be careful not to privilege reading or think it's better than what other people like to do.
For me, reading is play. Thinking about play and reading, for me, makes me think about flow and Csikszentmihalyi. When I'm reading for fun and pleasure, I often experience a state of flow- I can read for hours and hours and not realize it. I rarely experience that when reading for school. It might be tempting to solely attribute this to the fact that the reading has been assigned, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think it has more to do with cognitive load and ZPD. When I read for fun, I am generally reading books that require little effort on my part, whereas when I read for school it is often very cognitively taxing. When I read for school, I am definitely in my ZPD, stretching from what I'm able to do on my own to what I can do with a little help (discussions of the reading in class). When I read for fun, I am rarely in my ZPD, as I can read with no help whatsoever.
Perhaps play isn't always about the difference between work and play, or force and choice, but deals more with cognition and theories of learning.
You're right -- hadn't thought about it much before, but there is a real difference between when I read for 'work/school' and when I read for fun, which I do every night. I have to read something NON work/school before I can go to sleep at night, it's like a drug for me. It takes my mind somewhere else. It's almost like the 'fun book' is a transitional object, like a blanket for a child. It gets me comfortable. It's not just to go to sleep. If I'm on vacation (and do NOT bring a computer) I read voraciously, but it puts me in the zone of relaxation, whether by the beach, on a hammock, or on a couch in a cozy cabin. There is something very different about my state of mind and state of attention -- even if I'm attending to the 'fun book' and reading it and absorbing it's details, it is different. Perhaps it is not so much because I don't HAVE to read it, but that because the stakes of my understanding and comprehending and remembering the details of the books are different?
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