September 2006 Archives

I am trying very hard not to go to the Times Bookshop warehouse sale. Heeeeeeeellp!!!

I feel guilty every time I buy fiction, because fiction is pure pleasure; I'm sure I'd made an interesting case study for a psychologist somewhere. The thing is, I have a nagging feeling that if one were going to spend good money on books, one should buy useful books, and not books that are sheer indulgence. At least, that's the way I was raised.

"Why buy fiction when, once you've read the book, it'll just sit on the shelf?" my father's voice still rings in my head, clear and fresh after more than a decade. "You should buy books that you will find yourself turning to again and again, books you'll use for reference."

My parents did not read much fiction until recent years, when my father began to patronise the local library and my mother discovered John Grisham, among other lesser-known authors. They have never understood why one would desire to re-read a book, when the story is already familiar and the ending no longer a mystery.

"If you read your textbooks like you do your storybooks, you'd be straight-A students," my very disgruntled mother used to castigate my brother and I. Sure, we were always above average, placed in the top class at school, but we weren't at the top of the top, and to our parents, that was unforgivable. Because they just knew that if we'd made the extra bit of effort, we could've been there. But Jin & I weren't interested in being at the top for the sake of it; the boundaries of our world stretched beyond academics.

I was convinced there was more to life than studies and scoring A's; a silent rebel, I said nothing -- but my brother, always more rash and outspoken, told my mother baldly: "These things are of no cosmic consequence."

Not that it got her off our backs, but I left home soon after, and began amassing my collection. The amount of books I own horrifies my poor mother, prompting her continual attempts to persuade me to refrain from buying any more. Alas, her efforts are in vain!

It takes concentration and commitment to write worthwhile stuff. This I realised while writing for, of all things, my personal blog. There are always a lot of things I could say and intend saying, but I have to make myself sit down and write them out.

If I don't want to make the time or am too lazy to make the effort, it is easy to just write what I call a "bimbo post" about my day and what I've been doing. That doesn't take much thought, although it may still be entertaining. But I somehow feel like it doesn't count, precisely because it doesn't take much thought. Also because I feel that there's little value in the "today I had vanilla ice-cream for lunch" type of posts. What's the point of writing those? Anybody could do that. And many do.

But to write something truly worth reading, now, that's a challenge. Something that might make people think. Something that will resonate with my readers. Something that's really a part of me and is born out of the person I am. Something I can be proud of.

That's my goal -- to write things I can be proud of. Yet a lot of times, it happens without me noticing. When I look through my blog archives, I rediscover pieces I'd forgotten... pieces that make me marvel: "I wrote this?!"

Effortless effort. An contradiction and paradox. But that's what writing is for me, sometimes. At other times, it is conscious effort -- not the actual writing, but determining to write and following through on that determination. Laziness and procrastination get me every time.

Is there such a thing as a book-buying gene? A friend went to the Payless Books stock clearance sale and found "nothing to buy", emerging with a single book. I went and came out with 28 books!

"What did you buy?" she asked. That's a good question. I'm not too sure, myself.

• Children who have many books in their home do better in test scores than other children.
• Children whose parents read to them nearly every day do not do better in test scores compared to other children.

But conventional wisdom, Levitt asserts, is often wrong. In fact, he arrived at the above-mentioned conclusions after studying data collected by the US Department of Education in a project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). The project tracked the academic progress of more than 20,000 children from kindergarten till the fifth grade (generally from the time they were five till they reached the age of 10). Subjects were chosen from across the country to represent an accurate cross-section of American schoolchildren.

Let's start with the positive correlation: books in the home equal higher test scores. Most people would look at this correlation and infer an obvious cause-and-effect relationship. To wit: a little boy named Isaiah has a lot of books at home; Isaiah does beautifully on his reading test at school; this must be because his mother or father regularly reads to him. But Isaiah's friend Emily, who also has a lot of books in her home, practically never touches them. She would rather dress up her Bratz or watch cartoons. And Emily tests just as well as Isaiah. Meanwhile, Isaiah and Emily's friend Ricky doesn't have any books at home. But Ricky goes to the library every day with his mother; Ricky is a reading fiend. And yet he does worse on his school tests than either Emily or Isaiah.

What are we to make of this? If reading books doen't have an impact on early childhood test scores, could it be that the books' mere physical presence in the house makes the children smarter? Do books perform some kind of magical osmosis on a child's brain?

It's a conundrum, isn't it? But Levitt loves solving conondrums.

He reminds us, firstly, that "the data doesn't say that the books in the house cause the high test scores; it says only that the two are correlated".

Then he talks about interpreting the correlation. You see, IQ is apparently strongly hereditary (I hadn't known that), and Levitt offers a theory...

Most parents who buy a lot of children's books tend to be smart and well-educated to begin with. (And they pass on their smarts and their work ethic to their kids.) Or perhaps they care a great deal about education, and about their children in general. (Which means they create an environment that encourages and rewards learning.) Such parents may believe that every children's book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence. But they are probably wrong. A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicator.

But my question is, wouldn't a parent who read to his child every day also be concerned about his child and probably care a great deal about the child's education? Unless you were to further theorise that poorly-educated parents who work long hours at demanding jobs to bring home the bacon probably do not have the wherewithal to purchase books, even though they may still make the effort to read to their children.

So then it becomes purely an IQ thing and environment apparently doesn't make as much of a difference as we might think. Because among the other conclusions he drew from his study, Levitt also found that children of well-educated parents usually did better in school, but coming from a broken family or single-parent family did not noticeably affect test scores; neither did watching television frequently.

"Despite the conventional wisdom, watching television apparently does not turn a child's brain to mush," wrote Levitt's co-author, rather dryly.

Fascinating, no?