My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 7.
Is reading art?
Books have always been a big part of my life and my Christmas list was always just books, most of which I still have. The Children’s Classic series with their plain red covers and small black titles had a list of all the titles they produced in the inside cover and I used to tick them off, working out how many I could get for Christmas and birthday presents. It was never enough.
My most enduring memory of Christmas as a child was being repeatedly called down from my bedroom, where I would be blissfully engrossed in a new book, to a chaotic Christmas dinner with my grown up siblings and their families.
Reading is the thing I’ve always preferred over any other occupation and often with a sense of guilt, so it was a delight to read that Ursula K. Le Guinn in her book “The Wave in the Mind” believes that reading is art!
Le Guinn says, — and I identify with this statement with a passion — “Reading is active. To read is to tell the story, tell it yourself … A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, translating arbitrary symbols into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one.”
A bookshop in Fort Collins is paying people to sit and read for two hours a week.
Perelandra Bookshop has a reader-in-residence scheme. The reader commits to reading at the store for two hours per week in exchange for a small coffee and book stipend.
The reader-in-residence isn’t expected to produce anything. They don’t have to write an essay. They don’t have to host a book club or moderate a panel discussion. They don’t have to contribute to a blog or create sponsored content. They don’t have to do anything, except show up at the bookstore a couple of times per week and read.
Joe Braun, the principal book buyer at Perelandra, and the person who dreamed up the position says, “The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully.
“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly scrolling for information at best. At worst it’s just distraction - a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post.”
Joe is quietly encouraging people to experience what Ursula Le Guinn explains: “Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader — she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story, refuse to go along with it, make judgement, revise her judgements, and has time and room to genuinely interact.”
Most other art forms produce something that others can passively view, listen to, watch or ignore, but in reading, the imagination, the writer and the reader make unique experiences.
I’ll take that. I’m an artist.
