A few days ago, I listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4, an unapologetically rarefied radio station where presenters and many guests speak the kind of English you might not overhear on Peckham Rye. The programme was about how primary school pupils in Britain think it is now considered ‘uncool’ to read leisurely. According to the presenter, this attitude is only tangentially connected with the invasion of – and obsession with – e-toys like iPods, Nintendo, iPads, etc. Children just think reading was something people from the dim and distant past did – that is something unfashionable and fusty. Any pupil bearing a novel on school grounds is considered a geek.
As it happens, my ten-year-old daughter takes after me, so she reads and reads ravenously – although what with being a hostage to her needs and those of her two siblings, for me, ravenous reading now only comes in zigzaggy twists. But this tweenage offspring of mine appears to have channelled some of my reading rage into her head. She likes books no end, reading even more so.
I once told her a story of how my bookless grandmother came to visit and seemed to be confounded that her eight-year-old grandchild was always buried in one book or the other and that even if the TV was on, I’d ignore it, transfixing myself on the book I was reading. Of course, these were adventure books, and getting lost in them was far more important than the best of Baba Sala sitcoms – which I also loved. My grandmother would admonish: ‘Go out and play with your peers, little boy. Keeping your nose in a book every time is not good. No wonder you are skinny – the food you should have used to fatten up is wasted on reading.’ Well, that was quite Shakespearean (remember Caesar’s comment on Cassius’ progressive lankness). Needless to say, what the well-intentioned old woman said always washed over me.
Okay, my daughter may be distracted sometimes (a lot of times, really) by Disney Channel, CBBC, iPad, iPod, Iplayer and every sort of ego-trippy electronic escapism out there. But for her, nothing trumps reading—nothing at all. And she likes to read print, not any e-screen. She finds it hard to pore over Kindle and iPad reader. Just give her the book, a book, and she’ll lug it around for hours until she finishes it.
At her age, you hear kids riff: ‘I’m bored, dad.’ No, not this little bluestocking. She beguiles boredom with books. Okay, she says, ‘I am bored’ if she cannot find a book to read (rarely) and the teenager that she is, she repeats that boring phrase many times. But she somehow contrives to take books everywhere. During mere outings with her parents. On bus and train. During shopping excursions. She takes them to parks – she even took three novels for a day trip to Paris Disney!
She goes to school with at least four extracurricular tomes. She takes several books with her to wherever she is going because after polishing off one, she can plough into the second, and after ravening the second, she can career onto the next, and... She binges on books like an ample woman with a sweet tooth would binge on sweets.
She is the most prolific reader of books in her school, and though she can be loud and energetic when playing with her friends, she always finds the time to read. One day, I set her down at the school's gates, and before I could declutch, I saw her through the rear-view mirror, opening a book and chasseing straight into it. I calculated that there were only five minutes before the gates were opened, and she didn’t want to waste those precious minutes idling and gawking at nothing.
Would any of those standing with her there say to themselves: here comes the geek? Well, who can tell? So long as she is not bullied for being a ‘geek.’ And is she really a geek? Besides the ‘computer-geek’ revivalism of the word, the other (and older) meaning of 'geek' is ‘unfashionable and socially inept person.’ While I wouldn’t describe my daughter in such terms, reading, recreational reading is somewhat unfashionable now among kids. So, is she a geek? And if she is a geek, shouldn’t it be in a positive sense?
Isn’t all the reading she is doing making her savvier and sager than her peers (although I always try to see she is not reading any of those Mills-and-Boonish ‘novels for young adults’)? By the way, isn’t the word geek being ‘reclaimed’ now? Recalling Tom Wolfe’s 1970s ‘Radical Chic’ and its offshoot like ‘militant chic,’ isn’t there something like a geek-chic line of fashion now? Geek spectacles. Geek clothing. Geek hairstyle. Isn’t putting braces on your teeth now geekishly cool? Geekery or geekishness is in the process of melioration.
But then, how would a ten-year-old begin to know anything about postmodern irony and subversion? So it is all very well that so far as she knows (she told me), no one has called her 'geek' or the no less tart synonym ‘nerd.’ No child, however precocious, likes to be called names, even if it was a name which came from something as wholesome and beautiful as reading – and as empowering. Very much empowering. After all, fools, bigots, tyrants, barbarians and boors see books not only as boring they also see them as a threat; they loathe reading and booklearning and those who read, they burn books and might even put those who read (and write) on the pyre.
Meanwhile, I have made a vicarious appropriation of the word geek for her. I’ve told her: ‘If anyone calls you geek, look her straight in the eye and reply, “Yes, I am a geek and proud of being a geek.”’ As a matter of fact, I am thinking of commissioning a T-shirt with the potted inscription ‘I AM A PROUD GEEK’ on its front, and I would urge my daughter to wear it on her school sports day.
