“It’s a circus up there. All the lights go on. The connectivity is amazing.”
A crowd of about 30 people gathered at Te Noninga Kumu–Motueka District Library last Wednesday to hear esteemed New Zealand author Kate de Goldi speak about why reading – and especially reading for pleasure – matters so very much.
“Even just one person in a child’s life who privileges reading or hands on books – that can make a massive difference.”
Kate was appointed earlier this year as New Zealand’s latest Reading Ambassador/Te Awhi Rito, a role that is charged with helping to create a nation of readers.
The author’s dialogue tumbles with colourful, luminous phrasing – she snatches from the ether words like analogous and nexus and emollient to add vivid fullness to her speech.
Reading is in decline, she tells the crowd, her words conveying a steely determination to play a part in righting that wrong.
“I think one of the things the Reading Ambassador has to do is basically anoint and harness the rest of the country as an army of reading ambassadors.”
She describes the neuroscience that shows how a child’s brain lights up like a Christmas tree when they are read to, as well as the barriers that modern society has built.
“These parents are often working several jobs. They’re often utterly exhausted at the end of the day, and it’s the last thing they want to do.”
Screens are the “great big elephant in the room” in conversations around reading, she reckons, expressing that they have colonised our lives. She is not anti-screens, joking that her GPS got her to Motueka in the first place.
However, “it is…incontrovertible that screens are doing things with our brains that reading can work against and remediate,” The 10pm Question author says.
