Ella Berthoud - The Art of Mindful Reading: Embracing the Wisdom of Words

Reading is a pastime embraced by almost every culture in the modern world. Young and old, male and female, everyone reads (unless they have been raised by wolves) and reading is an inescapable part of life. For some, it is simply a functional habit, like eating to stay alive. For others, like me, its something we crave like a cactus craves sunshine. Without it, we would crinkle up.

W HEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD , my parents took me and my brother on a journey from Iran to Finland, driving in a Wolseley 1300. In those days we had no seatbelts, and I lay on the parcel shelf, with a stack of picture books. I decided I was going to learn to read, and I copied out the letters on each page, proudly showing them to my parents at the end of each day. I got through Ferdinand as we drove through Turkey, The Cat in the Hat as we traversed Hungary and Struwwelpeter as we sped around Germany. My brother Chris could already read, and he helped me to master the alphabet. By the time we reached Helsinki, I was firmly addicted to the magic of the page. Nothing could tear me away from a book, be it the cotton fields of Isfahan, or the metre-thick ice of Helsinki harbour. At first, delighted that I had been kept so well distracted during this three-week journey, undeterred through an avalanche and a heatwave, my parents soon began to wonder was I going to miss out on life through reading too much?

My mother was my first role model for reading it was her default entertainment, and she would never be without a book. Omnivorous in her literary consumption, she would read everything from sci-fi and crime to literary fiction, memoir, science books and magazines.

I was one of four children myself and three brothers and many was the moment when we would play Cowboys and Indians with guns, bows and arrows, a shouting, whirling mass of noise and bodies in mayhem around her, while she sat oblivious to it all, reading a book. She was able to switch off from everything around her and read with absolute concentration. This ability to disappear into a book was the first time I saw mindful reading in action. My mother put all her being into the book at that moment in time, and made the absolute most of her reading time. I learnt to copy her, and was soon lost in my own books, in parallel with my omnivorous parent. In our noisy household, I could be lost for hours on end, curled up in a chair, my body present but my head somewhere far away Narnia, with the four siblings who become kings, or the jungles of Africa with Tarzan, or joining in with the adventures of Tintin.