Are You Gonna Go Learn Your Words? The Case Study of Me.

Am I a reader??? What does it mean to read? Does reading even matter...? When I think of reading, I immediately picture my cousin. She is super sweet and unassuming. She gives the best hugs and puts a smile on my face every time I see her. She is also voracious. Voracious. She always has a book with her and she reads all the time. She reads in her spare time. She reads when we hang out at the park. She reads in school when she’s supposed to be listening to the teacher. She reads at our Bible study… books other than the Bible. She’s reading another book in between reading and talking about the Bible... She is the definition of a reader is ever there was one. When I compare myself to her, I think there’s no way in the world I’m a reader. In fact, when first posed the question at the beginning of the semester, my first inclination was to say that I wasn’t much of a reader anymore. I used to read a lot of books for pleasure; I devoured them. But the desire to read comes in seasons, and recently, it’s been a literary winter for me. I haven’t read anything for fun in the last nine months. So, I wasn’t a reader anymore, at least not at that moment. Then Kim Jaxon’s class barged its way back into my skull and has been rattling around in there ever since. The one about literacy studies? The one that says literacy is incredibly broad? The one that completely changed my view on all things reading and writing. I felt a little dumb for letting that initial doubt creep back into my mind when asked if I was a reader. Of course I’m a reader. I may not be as voracious as my lovely cousin, but I certainly read. And I read a lot. I might not have read a novel in a while, but I process incredible amounts of data every single day. If I’m being honest, a good amount of it is on social media sites. But it also encompasses a broad amount of other literatures, like online news articles, blog posts, random memes, emails, text messages and written

conversations, assignments, mail, signs and booths on campus, students’ essays that I’m editing, journal entries, cookbook recipes, restaurant ratings, traffic signs, advertisements, and notes my roommate leaves me… my literacy is nearly endless and seemingly ubiquitous in my life. In fact, if I couldn’t read, I think I would be hard-pressed to function sufficiently for a single day. This world thrives on literacy. And I am a reader. One of the most obvious and common forms of my reading comes through the dreadful tons of homework laden upon me daily (I’m only exaggerating a littlleee). As an English Education major with a minor in Linguistics, I kind of asked for it. Still, I think anyone would find this stack of books at least a little daunting.

Interestingly enough, when first asked if I was a reader, academic reading didn’t even cross my mind as applicable. For some reason, “reading” didn’t encompass mandatory, academic literature. Being a reader meant reading for pleasure. If that was the case, then I would certainly qualify, just based on the sheer quantity of books in my room (even if I hadn’t read them in a while). In fact, the more I thought about this assignment, the more I wanted to document just how much books played a role in my life, or at least in my house. So, I took pictures of all the books that I have in my house....

Books clearly take a prominent role in my room. As I was thinking of all the places that I had books, though, it never occurred to me that any were outside of my room. When I was taking pictures, I didn’t think I even needed to go into the living room or dining room to find books...I didn’t have any there. And then I realized I did. I used books not only in my personal space - in my bedroom where I valued their addition to the room - but also for decorative purposes that I had completely forgotten about.

I forgot that Jane Austin occupied my side table, and that Life magazine and American Greats welcomed me home at the front door everyday. Literacy had even become decorative.

Books were everywhere. It occurred to me that if I didn’t have books in my house, it would seem like something conspicuous was missing. Scouring my house reminded me of when I first moved into my house in Paradise (just let that sentence sink in for a bit...ok, I’m done pretending to gloat), the only thing my roommate saw me doing was reading. He would work all day and then come home to see me invariably on the couch reading. Every night. It got to the point where the only thing he thought I did was read. Of course, he only saw me during the time of day when I did. If he were home earlier, he’d see me doing laundry or painting or cooking. But he never was, so he never did. Similarly, at the beginning of this semester, my other roommate had much the same reaction. He somehow picked up on the fact that I’d be reading a lot when the seventh package came in the mail, and it was another book. I still don’t know how he did it. His powers of deduction seem to be above average (Oh my gosh! Can he read people?!). Now whenever I tell him I’m gonna hit the books, he always jokingly asks, “Are you gonna go learn your words?” And I alway reply, “Yup, I’m gonna learn ‘em real good.”

Then I go into my little haven of a room and start to read. I say haven because it really is. If you’re going to invest your time diving into a different world between pages of printed text, you might as well be comfortable. If you’re physically comfortable, you can expend all your energy on your mental faculties. As such, I almost always read on my bed or my couch.

Even overwhelmingly difficult semantics texts seem to be at least a little better when you’re surrounded by pillows and blankets. At the very least, you can smother yourself in them if you completely give up and pretend that the world doesn’t exist for a little while (I’ve found that my bed is indispensable for getting through college). And as this project proved to be a sort of case study of myself, I decided not only to document the books I kept, but also all the places that I read. Hence, the above-pictured bed and below-pictured couch. But those aren’t the only places I read. Far from it. Those just happen to be the most common.

Being a sleep-deprived, resource craving, walking zombie of a college student who sucks up every spare minute and minute crevice in which to pound out homework, I also utilize other spaces to read - most notably, the public bus. It’s not exactly Solomon’s Palace, but when you’re living on Cup-o-Noodles, and constantly fighting the unseemly proclivity for drooling in class, you’ll take what you can get, where you can get it. And hey, you never know the interesting conversations you’ll end up being swept into when you’re sitting next to the homeless man and “Uncle Kenny” who absolutely loves to tell you what he did that day.

All kidding aside, being able to read is pretty amazing. And being able to read in a myriad of different places just adds to that. As I mentioned before, reading dominates our lives whether we realize it or not. Social media, blogs, newspapers, books, texts, emails, articles - I read them everyday and everywhere - school, home, and in between. So what does it mean to read? Might as well ask what it means to be human, what it means to be a part of this world. Right now, for me, my world literally is reading. If I stopped all my reading, I would effectively stop all my goals, my entertainment, my growth. I genuinely do not think I’m exaggerating when I say that if I stopped reading, I would stop any sort of meaningful interaction with this world. I know we’re focusing on meta, but reading is really big.

Perhaps, just like reading a text is not dependent on a specific words but the whole meaning, perhaps reading as a whole is so much bigger than any one specific type. And perhaps putting together my reading as a whole will be much more meaningful than looking at just one particular aspect. I could talk about how I read, post the videos that I took of me reading both academic texts and entertainment texts, and dive into how I could see my eyes’ saccade. I could talk about the short-term and long-term retention that I have of the texts that I read (or lack thereof; I don’t remember what I was reading) or how tunnel vision and signal detection theory hindered me from understanding the academic text. Or, I could talk about what I’ve learned this semester. And in so doing, I doubt I would use very much of the terminology I’ve learned from Smith’s text... but I would be able to tell you some awesome principles and ideas that I’ve learned. I could tell you how my view of reading has broadened once again, and how I’ve come to appreciate both the complexity and enormity that reading is. Because if I’ve learned anything at all from this class, it’s that context and the broader picture is always of utmost importance when reading. Words are bigger than letters and sentences bigger than words. But meaning is most important of all. And meaning is what I glean from reading. And if prior knowledge and non-visual information play such a key role in understanding and interpreting a text, then this class has certainly added to that storage of data floating around somewhere in my grey matter that will influence how I read and interpret later texts. What does it mean to be a reader? I read the world I live in. I read, and therefore I understand my context, my world. My world right now is college. But now that I think about it, I can’t put my reading into categories. As much as categories help us narrow the information net, to me there are no categories - no academic texts, no entertainment texts. There is only meaning. In one sense, this class seems...ironic. We’re determined to take a meta approach to reading and in so doing, we learn about tunnel vision and the dangers of looking too hard at any too small portion of words. But reading is broad, and my reading practices are broader. And meaning is made up of broad texts. In reality, this is probably just a bunch of hullabaloo of a tacit theory with no non-primary resources - my own ideology conveyed through snarky narrative. But the more I think of it, and the more I look at myself as a case study, the more I realize that I am voracious like my cousin. I’m so voracious, I consume my world. And I can do that, all cuz I learned my words real good.