The commenter is female or so I surmise from the name Hannah. The malapropism — "vivacious" for "voracious" — amused me. I guess she got overly enthused that her boy — despite the burden of being a boy — was reading, really reading, reading a lot. It's hard to picture reading being done vivaciously, but I enjoyed trying. And "voracious reading" is trite. We ought to stop saying it. I'm tired of the eating metaphor for reading, and it's not as though I can picture people eating books. Vivacious reading is at least something new.
And please don't try to tell me that "vivacious reader" isn't wrong because Ken Follett is quoted (somewhere) saying "Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer." Follett originally used the old trite expression "voracious reader" and somebody else screwed up copying the quote.
But let's read the article! Excerpt:
"A lot of things have a biological basis but are totally malleable,' said Dalton Conley, a sociologist at Princeton whose research has shown how a child’s genes and environment interact to affect reading outcomes. 'It doesn’t mean we couldn’t, if we wanted to as a society, devote so many resources to improving boys’ reading and teaching it to them in a different way that we couldn’t close the gap.' A range of research has shown how children’s environments influence their reading skills. The stereotypes held by parents, teachers and classmates all affect boys’ reading performance. Mothers talk more to their baby daughters than to their sons. Even when boys scored the same as girls in reading, teachers ranked the girls higher." A review of nearly 100 studies found that by age 8, students believed that girls were better at verbal skills, and that this affected boys’ confidence and interest in reading later on. Perhaps because of these influences, girls are more likely to say they like to read — so they do it more and get better at it. Also highly correlated are the kinds of classroom behaviors that lead to learning — things like attentiveness, working independently and sitting still. These are skills that girls tend to develop earlier than boys — and as schools have begun expecting children to learn to read earlier, boys could be at a disadvantage."
ADDED: I looked into the reading-as-eating metaphor and found "Of Studies" by Francis Bacon (1597):
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
But that's not voracious reading. Bacon wants us to be very selective in what and how we read. "Voracious" suggests eating like a non-human animal. The first definition in the OED is "Of animals (rarely of persons, or of the throat): Eating with greediness; devouring food in large quantities; gluttonous, ravenous." I love this quote from 1699: "The King Carrion Crows..are very voracious, and will dispatch a Carkass in a trice."
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92 comments:
Many 11-year-old boys were vivacious readers back when Playboy was still worth reading.
A promiscuous reader… maybe?
Vivacious/voracious strikes me as an AI clarity edit.
I don’t think the author really understands either word.
And the elephant in the room must be acknowledged:
Boys are behind in reading because 95% of elementary teachers are AWFLs that hate little boys.
It really starts at the home, when the children are young. My parents did an excellent job of taking us to the Library. The AF base Library had book reading contests... and while my brother and I both did them - He was reading Watership down as a child while I was reading Beverly cleary books... Kids need their parents to put them in front of books... and deny them the ability to just watch content.
Remember this?
How to Eat a Poem
Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
It may have something to do with the titles suggested to them.
The use of "voracious" is expanding from just food. It's an appetite for a subject, which certainly can be food, but also other activities like reading, sex, exercise, etc. Obsessively reading a book for an entire day to finish it is akin to "devouring" it. As the Dude would say, trite is just like your opinion, man.
Girls have always read more than boys. Boys have lots of other things to do that are impossible while sitting on your ass.
Have you noticed how Kristie Noem always confuses perpetuate for perpetrate. Last night she even used the word “perpetuater.”
Noem Crosby? Queen of the malaprop?
My nephews loved the TIn Tin series. Anime before anime was invented. My sister in law, as woke as they come, but a promoter of reading, was duly conflicted.
And the dreary type of children’s literature today shoehorned with trans and gay children doing transversive but not adventurous things. Later on fantasy novels slightly fill the gap.
I don't read many complete books anymore, even audio books. There is too much filler.
As a kid, reading was a compulsion. It still is. I'm not sure why.
Yes, it's all women's fault. Men have no agency. Wait a second. Doesn't that make the men with no agency actually women? Achilles is just expressing his self-hate
Reading for pleasure is an activity that has too much status. Who cares if you prefer to listen to music, watch a movie or read a book. Consumption of media is not inherently laudable.
If you want boys to read then write the shit that they like. If you write the shit that they like then the boys will read.
When I was a boy there just wasn’t that much to do. You could go out and try to hit a little ball with a stick, you could catch frogs, or you could read. I don’t know how I’d have turned out if we’d had content.
"A perpetuator is someone who causes something to continue or persist, often referring to the continuation of an action or idea. In simpler terms, it's a person who keeps something goin."
It could work.
BACON! Who doesn't love BACON! I could read about BACON all day.
"It may have something to do with the titles suggested to them."
Absolutely. Put C.S.Forester on the reading list. It would probably cause a panic among the teachers though.
I'm with Achilles. Sounds more like Auto Incorrect was turned on, and if that misquote is as famous as you imply it's also likely an example of LLM mislearning.
Boys often consider sitting and reading to be a chore, or even punishment. I think girls feel differently about it.
Is Jack London ever read anymore? I doubt that teachers offer it.
Buy the books, send them to school and what do they do?
Boys need to given something they want to read. Pirates, adventures, wars, etc.
I was a terrible reader as a child. Not that I couldn't read, I was a slow reader and therefore hated reading. I didn't read text books. I learned by watching and doing. Still do, though I read a lot now, just not novels. Gave that up quite a while ago. Lots of boys in my era read comic books, I didn't. I had stuff to do and couldn't waste time reading.
I became a vivacious reader when I was in the Army. Couldn't just go out and do stuff. And with the Army's propensity to hurry up and wait, there were periods of inactivity where a paperback came in handy. I went from not reading to an inability to not read something, even if it was the back of a cereal box while eating said cereal.
Boys may not read but men read, a lot. Every job requires you to read. You can't perform it without reading something. So there's always hope that a non reader today will turn into a vivacious reader in the future.
My mother was smart and a vivacious reader. She graduated high school at sixteen and would have been a teacher, had she not left Kansas during the depression. My dad was smart, just not book smart. The only thing I ever saw him read was the newspaper when he got home from work. But, he could do anything.
My late wife was a voracious reader. I was regularly astonished by how greedily she devoured books. Alas, our children apparently do not want her extravagant library.
As a kid, my mom bought a set of encyclopedias. One volume came every week. I read the whole thing like it was candy. I still would do that, but getting through a novel is almost impossible. No filler in the encyclopedia.
We need less perpetrators and fewer perpetuation.
The more I read these type of pieces, the more convinced I am that we need separate schools for boys and girls.
Yes, it's all women's fault. Men have no agency.
If women are teaching the classes and choosing the assigned books, it makes sense that boys will be less interested in the material and spend less time reading.
Marie: Raymond, you never read Tom Sawyer?
Ray: Well, all right, I didn't. So what?
Marie: You never read Tom Sawyer?!
Ray: And you never read Legendary Running Backs of the NFL.
Marie: That's sports.
Ray: That's right, Ma, a sports book. A sports book! That's because that's what I liked! All this stuff they make you do in school, that's what they think is important. I did- I read what I wanted to, and look at me. I am someone who did not read Tom Sawyer, and yet I did not turn out to be a hobo.
I’m currently reading ‘ The Award’ by author Mathew Pearl.
Satirical psychological thriller set in Cambridge's literary scene. A biting skewer of publishing egos, ambition, and moral compromise.
From my experience, the best way to get boys more interested in reading is to give them access to books about the things that interest them. All through elementary school, the books they had us read were not interesting in the least. Reading was a chore that I didn't enjoy. This was almost 60 years ago. I can only imagine how bad it is for boys in school now.
For me, my interests were (and still are) aviation, space, science, and 20th century military history. Once I found books that I enjoyed, I went to my public library and became a binge reader. I was allowed to check out up to 10 books at a time for 3 weeks. I went every week, returning one set of 10 and getting another set. I had 30 books checked out at once. My reading level improved from reading at the 5th grade level when I was in the 6th grade to reading at grade 14+ level in the 8th grade. My other school grades improved as well. I don't know if it was a coincidence that I went from 20/20 vision to nearsighted at the same time.
I'm hoping Sydney Sweeney is a vivacious reader.
That's no autocorrect, IMO. That has the ring of a perfect malapropism. From an overenthusiastic aunt bragging on a NYT comment page. She wants NYT people to KNOW!
Sabatini, yes!
I was a vigorous reader from an early age, and have to take most (but not all) the credit for myself. My father was a college grad, and my mother had a couple of years, but neither was much of a reader--I'm not sure I ever saw him reading, and my mother read stuff like Peyton Place.
We did, however, have the World Book, and at my father's parents' house was Handy Volume set of the 11th Ed. Britannica . . . which now has a place of honor in my living room, and which still entertains and enlightens.
Paddy O. said:
In what world were a majority of 11 year old boys ever really readers?
Guess I was fortunate to grow up in a home where Dad always had a book, running the gamut from pop fiction to serious non-fiction. Mom was more of a magazine person, but she had 8-9 subscriptions come each month, Reader's Digest, Ladies Home Journal, Prevention, etc).
So at 11, I was mostly reading Hardy Boys and westerns, as well as devouring Sports Illustrated each week. But by then also began to dabble in heavier stuff such as A Stillness At Appomattox, the cop wroter Joseph Waumbaugh, and even a bit of Hunter Thompson.
Role models in the home make a difference.
Michael, I grew up in the same kind of home. Both my parents were readers and we had a lot of books at home and great libraries around. That hits on my point. 11 year old boys didn't just decide to not read in this generation. They grew up in homes where their parents aren't readers, whose own parents weren't readers. There's not, nor never really has been, a majority of people who are role models for reading.
I can't remember much of what they had us reading in school--I used the school and public libraries to the hilt, and I guess merely endured the official curriculum.
As for the gender issue, none of the girls I knew read very much--certainly not as much as I did, anyway--and they read different stuff.
FWIW, in standardized tests I score high across the board, but with the 'female' pattern of higher verbal ratings.
Sabatini is really good stuff! I had read Sea Hawk and Captain Blood way long ago (I was in an Errol Flynn movie watching phase too). But his others are mostly very good. I really, really loved his The Strolling Saint (my experience with church likely feeds into that).
I will be a literary heretic and say while I've read Tom Sawyer, I didn't like it or Huckleberry Finn. Maybe that teacher imposed frustrations about it. But his short stories are among my favorite literature and Connecticut Yankee is great too. I wish Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls was required reading in schools.
Narr, I'm the same with standardized tests.
I forgot how to read after first grade. I recall looking through the second grade books, stacked on a table in the back of the classroom, and finding nothing interesting. I didn't learn to read again until I started reading science fiction in fourth grade. Nuclear powered rockets going to Mars, that was worth reading.
--- Hardy Boys
Yay! Biff and a roadster.....
There was also old Frank Yerby.
Funny about Twain--I found Twain stuff that wasn't assigned to be more interesting than what was.
My father, the non-reader, at least spurred my interest in WWII (and by extension, all that led up to it) by preparing some binders documenting his air force service as the cancer worked away inside.
I still have the paperback copy of Ike's Crusade in Europe that he had but never read.
I became a coffee house - think Denny's - and a coffee shop - Starbucks - reader. Always had a newspaper or paperback with me. Now it's a phone or tablet. Now we're chastised for spending to much time staring at screens. Same applies to waiting rooms. It seems that people assume that you're not reading when you're looking at a screen.
I remember the readers digest condensed and the columbia book club
Devouring a book, I've seen that one too many times.
It's said Napoleon read books while traveling in his imperial coach when not engaged in military business with his staff chief, Louis-Alexandre Berthier. When he finished a book, he threw it out the window like an Egg McMuffin wrapper.
Before we started making books out of indigestible cellulose, we made them from more comestible stuff -- vellum pages within leather bindings. Vellum is lamb skin. Leather, of course, is the skin of a cow. Back in the day, you really could devour a book, and you might even need to.
“Voracious reader” really did describe me as a young man. I read stuff the way dogs eat stuff. My dad had an encyclopedia set that was already 15 years old. I read it repeatedly, cover to cover. I read loose books about really anything. All the Hardy Boys books. All the Louis L’Amour books. My dad had a stack of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines that was almost as tall as I was. I read them all. We acquired a 2-foot stack of National Geographics. I read ‘em. Newsweek, Time, Life, Ladies Home Journal, Reader’s Digest—I devoured them all, without chewing. Voracious reader indeed.
Assigned books like the chocolate wars by cormier ugh
Lots of science fiction then spy tales and the like
I remember the readers digest...
I remember digesting a few readers, myself. *burp*
Video games and on-line porn. I didn't even see my first video game until I was almost 14 years old it cost a quarter/play miles away. The only porn I had access to was a few squirreled away Playboys, Penthouses, and Ouis. I grew up just in time to not be completely ruined by vices.
Perhaps the writer was influenced by "avid", the go to adjective for those that read a lot and voracious became vivacious.
How about a voluptuary reader? That's me on a chaise in my crimson silk dressing gown and smoking cap, listening to my Bryan Ferry playlist on repeat while scantily clad women bring me books and take the pugs for walkies. CC, JSM
Or an anthology: The Voluptuary Reader - de Sade, Casanova, Byron, various anonymous Victorians, etc. Best read on your chaise in your silk dressing gown. CC, JSM
Nice short essay, I liked it. You did not glimpse into the future- imperfect tense. Boys may not need to read what with the interwebs and such. This species has been maybe 90-95% illiterate in the past, we did OK. Concepts and Ideas are more important for knowing and sharing. The Iliad was known and memorized by dozens of generations of non-readers, but a shared understanding of ''What is honor?' 'Are the Gods just?' etc. These were shared by the entire culture.
Rogan's podcasts could be like that, boys/men all having a shared understanding of concepts. And perhaps like monks hearing chanted lessons, or masonic ritual involving long memorizations, maybe boys learn better in a symposium. They will be all on line--which is kinda exactly like a book anyway.
I doubt that any of the non readers out there are reading these comments.
How about "bookworm" ... a term we have used forever for folks who like to read. But literal bookworms would eat the books, especially if they were, uh, voracious.
I'm a big reader. When I was young my parents enrolled me in two book of the month clubs. One was the All About series, like All About Volcanos and such like. The other was history and bios, like Francis Marion, Swamp Fox.
My fourth grade teacher had a year-long reading contest for the class with the running score on a big tag board. I read 74 books that grade. We were supposed to write a book report on each book but after a few I convinced Miss Judith that writing reports interfered with my reading and she let me give her a verbal report. [I won the contest by a mile.]
Now that there are no construction projects about my house and I don't have a gardens and a chickens anymore I would have to say my hobby is reading. Voraciously.
Etymological identities.
Jim Gust - Your local library may have a fund raising program for donating books. If not, Thriftbook.com may be able to help for an extensive collection. I have been thinking about this since I have an extensive pre-Kindle collection that I don't want to end up at the dump when I need to move.
I took a children's lit course in my MLIS program (UTenn, 1993), a segment of which had us reading and evaluating 24 Young Adult novels. (My last semester, and I had to take two classes instead of the single one I had planned, and there wasn't any choice if I wanted to apply for the job opportunity that had just opened up unexpectedly.)
Made me glad I went to school before YA was a thing. Not that they were all bad, but boy were they PC.
The section on illustrated/picture books for ages up to 10 or so was fun.
Francis Bacon was right about that too.
My father‘s first language was Yiddish But learning English was an extremely high priority. I suspect he was genuinely a “voracious reader” as he consumed and thoroughly digested the English dictionary as a young man. That was back in 1919 or so so, perhaps before the phrase became trite. He would have us test him by opening a dictionary and picking any word and he knew the definition of every single one.
Kevin said...
“Marie: Raymond, you never read Tom Sawyer?
Ray: Well, all right, I didn't. So what?
Marie: You never read Tom Sawyer?!
Ray: And you never read Legendary Running Backs of the NFL.
Marie: That's sports.
Ray: That's right, Ma, a sports book. A sports book! That's because that's what I liked! All this stuff they make you do in school, that's what they think is important. I did- I read what I wanted to, and look at me. I am someone who did not read Tom Sawyer, and yet I did not turn out to be a hobo.”
A later joke is that Marie quotes Jim Brown’s statistics indicting that she did read Legendary Running Backs of the NFL.
I suppose somebody who just reads literary criticism is a vicarious reader.
Vicarious reader is trending with gender neutral appeal to both sexes.
Most writing sucks. The stuff assigned to young kids sucks and moralizes.
As long as kids are literate then society is fine. Symbolism is overrated and endlessly open to interpretation.
Etymology is ignored. Candor is downplayed
I have been a constant reader ever since I learned how to read. Right now I'm reading three different books (The Civil Wars - Appian, The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera, and The Last Kingdom - Bernard Cornwell) and my TBR pile is threatening to overtake the spare room. I go anywhere without a book or my kindle because you never know when you might have time to get in a few more pages. But I am/was an outlier. Most of my male friends read very little.
I lived in a town of 25,000 in S.E. Washington State in the 1950s. The Carnegie Library was about six blocks from my house and from the third through the seventh grade when my family moved to Southern California that library got a workout. It was a great and wonderful place for a boy.
NERDS!
Boys may not read but men read, a lot
Rare is the day that I don't read a book from cover to cover about the Roman Empire and think, longly and deeply, about said topic. For is that not what makes us men?
Boys probably don't read as much because, I assume, the juvenile books for boys these days are just a cloyingly woke as everything else.
If you have a young boy, try the Heinlein science fiction juveniles. That's what got me going. The list can be found on Wikipedia.
AI tells us:
"Clichés are often deemed unavoidable because they serve as efficient, understood shorthand in communication, conveying complex ideas quickly to a wide audience. While they risk making writing feel unoriginal, they are culturally rooted, sometimes necessary for pacing, and can be used effectively if modified or blended with original thought."
AI's been attacked as a cliche factory ...
https://aeon.co/essays/sure-ai-can-do-writing-but-memoir-not-so-much
... but that just makes it human ...
To be an avid reader you need to read something that interests you. I learned how to read from the sports page following the Yankees. I also got a basic sense of math by reading the stats every day and trying to guess how a game I watched would effect them.
Sydney Sweeney, voluptuous reader?
Speaking of v-words, I was surprised years ago to hear "voluptuous" used as a synonym for "busty." That may be the main meaning of the word now. Possibly it's what it always sort of meant for those in the know.
-------
I was a big reader as a child, but what I read came out of the heroic version of American history that's no longer accepted. If it weren't, maybe boys would read more and aspire to become more.
I read the Boy Scout Handbook and Boy's Life magazine. I read a book of humor called Summer Daze. I read the Guiness Book of World Records. I read lots of science fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars). I read The Memory Book by Harry Lorraine and Jerry Lucas. The only book I remember from school was a brief biography of OJ Simpson the year he rushed for 2003 yards. In my experience, boys will read things that interest them.
"bagoh20 said...
Is Jack London ever read anymore? I doubt that teachers offer it."
We may need to light a fire under said teachers.....
"If you have a young boy, try the Heinlein science fiction juveniles."
Better still, try Treasure Island. Stevenson wrote it for children, but given the quality of our public education edifice, most adults today would find it hard going without an OED to hand. But there's nothing that will spur a boy's lust for the authentic literature -- I mean a real boy, one with a 1 molar solution of piss and vinegar inside -- than Jim Hawkins in the crosstrees with two pistols leveled at Israel Hand's loathsome head.
Get it through the Althouse portal.
Better still, try Treasure Island.
Stevenson was a wonderful writer. When I read him I am blown away by the clarity of the language and skill at story telling.
A later joke is that Marie quotes Jim Brown’s statistics indicting that she did read Legendary Running Backs of the NFL.
Yes, she did as a means to force Ray to read Tom Sawyer.
If I could come up with a Grok prompt to summarize this thread, it would probably tell me that boys will read if they are interested in the topic. This is something we all seem to know instinctively yet here we are, decades later, still discussing it.
How can it be that we haven’t fixed it — haven’t adjusted school reading lists to account for it?
"How can it be that we haven’t fixed it — haven’t adjusted school reading lists to account for it?"
Because schools at all levels are more concerned with internal than external goals. This is the fundamental characteristic of a bureaucracy. Everything is about pleasing the internal value system, not delivering on externally imposed mandates. Its all about compliance with the internal culture of the profession.
Private businesses (with the exception of those that have achieved monopolistic positions) have external source of discipline, to keep them honest, which is the need to grow and show a profit. But schools arent in that disciplined space. Even for profit schools arent usually kept in a state of discipline by hard external metrics.
This is hardly a secret. You can spend years reading the Harvard Business Review and run across this constantly.
>Kai Akker said...
>--- Hardy Boys
>
>Yay! Biff and a roadster.....
I remembered it as Chet and his jalopy. I didn't remember Biff at all. The Google AI agrees that Chet was the one with the car, and says that in the late 1950's some references to it as a roadster were changed to jalopy in later editions. Biff was another -- more vigorous -- friend, but had completely faded from my recollection. When reading the books I never understood what a jalopy was. My puzzlement is likely why the memory stuck. I'm not sure I know what a jalopy is even today!
Given that the percentage of kids who can even read in the first place is low and going lower, "how to get boys to read more" is pretty academic (ha).
It has long been a mystery to me how it is that billions of people in diverse countries, over decades, have mastered literacy but somehow American kids--the richest and most pampered in the world--can not.
Of course, I have developed theories.
Every 11-year-old boy I knew as an 11-year-old knew how to read. The 12-year-old boys I teach today, not so much. I have never known so many kiddos with reading levels down around the K-1 level. I don't have Jack London--but I DO have the graphic novel adaptation of "Call of the Wild."
I read everything I could get my hands on. Do you know how many times I read the back of the same cereal box at breakfast?
I was a voracious reader in school, and for some reason it made everyone think I was stupid. Until I went to college.
its these shells* that they carry and also terrible reading selections
*Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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