A Velocity of Being: Letters to Young Readers, a beautiful and huge, 280-page hardcover brick of a book compiled over eight years or more through their asking dozens of leading people in the public sphere—many of them not surprisingly writers—about the way reading had been central in the shaping of their lives (no one said it hadn’t been important, of course; I assume any such letters were respectfully not included. I was imagining some of the letters from some of my high school students many years ago as a counter-argument).
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Some letters I liked came from Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, (educational psychologist) Jerome Bruner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yo-Yo Ma, Judy Blume. I liked most of them, don’t get me wrong, but after a time I wondered about the audience for such a book. Pro-reading types, of course: Librarians, English/language arts teachers, Goodreads readers!! as well as the target audience stated in the title, young readers, but if they already like to read they would mostly rather read a book than talk about why books are so great. And the kids (or adults) who hate reading, well, this book ain’t gonna talk ‘em into it. But many of the statements are lovely, what any of us might have said, though why have a book what we said, we want to know what successful said about how reading help shape them and become world-renowned. It’s a kind of well-written confirmation of most readers’ generally held views, some of them a bit short and obvious.
But this is one gorgeous artifact, a coffee-table book every school and library oughtta have on display. I’ll tell you why I would personally want it, though. Popova also knows thousands of terrific illustrators, and she gets some of the best I know, a one page illustration per letter: Isabelle Arsenault, Chris Ware, Oliver Jeffers, Maira Kalman, Shaun Tan, Art Spiegelman. Almost every page is gorgeous, just stunning, like visual poems about reading. That’s the primary reason why this book gets five stars from me.
I loved Chris Ware’s two page illustrated story, one of my faves.
I liked this story: Author Elizabeth Gilbert skipped school to stay home and read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. She got caught lying and was grounded. Yet she never forgot that day or that book. (How many days would I have preferred to stay home from school and just read a book all the way through!? Many of them!)
Holocaust survivor Helen Fagin once lived in a Polish ghetto where reading was punishable by hard labor, even death (like slaves in this country!), but she risked her life running a secret school for kids, though it couldn’t be about facts, she soon realized:
“What they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility. There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts.”
Though I generally liked school, that’s why I would have wanted to stay home from time to time, as learning in school was often configured as an accumulation of facts and skills rather than passionate engagement with the world through the imagination. You and I already know this, but it is nice to see it confirmed here again and again in this book.
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