What kinds of book are most popular with children in your country? Why do you think that is?
I think the most popular kind of books with children in China is comics. Statistics and my person experience with children bring me to this conclusion. First of all, if you bother to check the top sellers in terms of books, you will find comics for children permanent residents in those lists. As a comparison, those books telling fairytales and legends seem a little weak in terms of effect on children. Also, whenever I find some children gazing at their smart phone or tablets or reading a paper back book, they are mostly reading comics. It has become a great challenge to find kids focusing on words instead of pictures. Based on these two evidences, I believe comics are most children’s favorite in China.
Why do you think some children do not read books very often?
Well, for this issue, I think the shift of lifestyle is first and foremost to blame. In the online era, we, no matter adults or children have tens of alternatives to do in our spare time and reading a book is one of the most attention-intense among them. Why not go surf the Internet using your smart phone or tablet for some easy-to-understand stuff with beautiful pictures explaining everything to you, or some other rich media requiring no literacy. We grownups still struggle to escape from such grasp, needless to say the children.
How do you think children can be encouraged to read more?
Before we dive into the question, I think I need to make it clear that the children today have been reading far more than we expect. Read Weibo posts, WeChat messages, endless news feeds and many other kinds of media. They are avid readers that older people cannot match with. What grownups are trying to do in this scenario is to shift their focus of reading from those “light” material back to some old-school, serious and provoking thoughts created by real thinkers. Upon this problem I hold a pessimistic opinion. What we can hope for is nothing but luck which can bring a few on them to what grownups want them to read.
Reading for different purposes
Are there any occasions when reading at speed is a useful skill to have? What are they?
Yes indeed. Based on my own experience as a university student, reading at speed can save me from piles of papers to finish before a near deadline. Suppose a student needs to finish reading three or even more papers of more than one hundred pages and write a report about the issue discussed in them, and even worse, the deadline is two days from now. In this case, reading at speed is quite comforting. Another occasion where reading at speed is extremely helpful is to do a presentation about an unfamiliar topic in a short time. If the presenter can read fast enough and memorize what he or she has read about, the presentation can be fully equipped with knowledge though it may be not logically organized in some ways, but at least the audience can have something to digest. This looks very much like a cheat but turns out to be useful.
Are there any jobs where people need to read a lot? What are they?
Yes, definitely. For instance, journalist, novelist or any other kinds of jobs involving writing requires a great amount of reading. These jobs are basically about output, which means to take in information and process it into different forms for more people’s better understanding of the issue. In this situation, reading as a crucial source of gathering information is indispensable. Without adequate input, the output will be dry in all ways so that the jobs calling for detailed information will be total failures.
Do you think that reading novels is more interesting than reading factual books? Why is that?
Yes I do. As an avid reader of novels, I always have a preference for books with an intense plot to those with merely knowledge or information. Generally speaking, I believe all kinds of books are written to communicate certain knowledge to their readers but the knowledge are packed in different covers. Some are embedded in a story, which is what novels do with the knowledge, and some are delivered within a series of experiments and assumptions, which is how factual books are organized. The preference for novels is parallel to the fondness of junk food instead of the tasteless fibers and protein capsulated inside colorful pills. What matters to a person’s taste for books is heavily influenced by the way the information is communicated. That is how I look at the preference for novels to factual books.
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