Fact or Fiction? It's bookish mythbusting time!

[Apologies, listeners! We're re-releasing this one because there was an audio glitch in the original episode. If you've already downloaded the episode from Wednesday, try this one instead!] 

Happy New Year! There are some beliefs, truisms, urban legends, myths, whatever you want to call them, about books and reading that seem like they just won't die. Do audiobooks really count as reading? Are all readers introverts? Has reading education in schools really gone downhill? Is learning to read a natural process that will just happen organically if we let it? We talk about all these questions and more. Join us for some bookish mythbusting to start the new year!
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Books we're reading in this episode:   
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl
The House Witch by Delemhach
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Le Fay (Morgan Le Fay #2) by Sophie Keetch
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Sources:  

• https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-myths-about-reading-books
• Five Myths About Reading & How to Put Them to Death (goinswriter.com): https://goinswriter.com/reading-myths/
• Ten Myths About Learning to Read | Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/about-reading/articles/ten-myths-about-learning-read
• The Myths About Reading We Need to Bust | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/myths-reading-we-need-bust-bitelyai

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Intro and outro music: "The Chase," by Aves.

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Read on!

Transcript

[All Books Aloud intro and theme music]

Martha: Hey, Liz.

Elizabeth: Hi, Martha.

Martha: How are you today?

Elizabeth: I'm doing okay. As we were just discussing, I had a cat interrupted night of sleep.

Martha: Oh, no.

Elizabeth: But I had a huge coffee this morning and I'm getting through it. How are you?

Martha: Same. It's a slow morning, but I'm excited to chat with you today and I'm really [00:01:00] excited to hear what you're reading 

Elizabeth: so my physical book that I'm reading right now is called The Paris Novel by Ruth Reischel. And Ruth Reischel is most well known for being the editor of Gourmet Magazine before it, went under. And when it went under, she was the editor. And, Wrote in a book that she published after that about , how crazy that whole experience was, but she's written several memoirs.

She's a really good memoirist and cookbooks, , her big thing is food, but she wrote a novel a few years ago called Delicious, , that I , really loved. It was her first piece of fiction. And . It's been several years , since Delicious, but she just came out with this new novel called the Paris Novel.

And it is about Stella, who is a young woman, , who has a very strained relationship with her mother. And then her mother dies unexpectedly and [00:02:00] leaves her all the money that she has, which is not very much. It's like 8, 000, but basically the stipulation of the inheritance is that she's only allowed to use it to go to Paris.

 The strife with her mom is essentially that her mom and her are very different and her mom was very outgoing.

And always wanted Stella to be different than she was, and so it feels like, it's her mom's last ditch effort to, , control Stella and , turn her into the woman that her mom wanted her to be. And then, of course, Stella doesn't want to go, but she ends up going.

 I'm probably between a quarter and a third of the way through.

And , I don't love it as much as I loved Delicious, but I am liking it enough that I haven't stopped reading it. It's a little bit heavier than Delicious. It's definitely heavier than, the rom coms that I've been reading. , as we've discussed, I just read Funny Story right before this, the new Emily Henry novel that you graciously let me borrow and was absolutely wonderful and I loved it.

, so this is a little bit of a [00:03:00] departure from that, but I do like it

Martha: It sounds similar to main character energy in some of the plot points.

Elizabeth: Yeah, definitely. The main characters are very different. But yeah, the premise, , and that's actually the premise of a lot of novels. I actually wrote a novel also with an inheritance at the beginning. I think it's a really common framing that novelists use to get their main characters out of their normal lives.

It's just one of those tropes that, you know, is an easy way to pluck your character out of their normal life and put them in a different situation. , So yeah, it's not uncommon, I'm not sure where it's going, but my assumption is that it's going to be like a, she finds herself and figures out who she is and her world is opened up in the same way that main character energy had that

Martha: Mm

Elizabeth: Self acceptance, self love type of thing.

Martha: Mm hmm. So what are you listening to? Do you have an audiobook going?

Elizabeth: Yes, I do. It's called The House Witch by Delemhach, it's that cozy fantasy about the witch that has, cozy home [00:04:00] kitchen type of powers.

 He's a really good cook and he makes people feel safe and comforted. , which is a really, adorable premise. And I loved it at the time that you described it in one of our previous episodes, but now that I have been reading it, it's even better than I was imagining in terms of it just is like a warm hug.

The idea of his powers, you know?

Martha: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: , so yeah, I've been enjoying that. It's definitely not my normal fare. , audiobooks, , for me are relatively new anyway in the last couple of years since we started, talking about all this. reading stuff. I've been getting more into audiobooks, but I still haven't really, other than this book and maybe like one or two others, I haven't really branched out into the sci fi fantasy genres because, I don't know, , was gonna say that they're usually not really my speed, but that's, Not necessarily true because I'm enjoying this one, , and Alex and I read The Lord of the Rings and I enjoyed that.

So I don't know what the mental block is, but they're just not the things that I'm likely to pick up or to be drawn toward. [00:05:00] So I don't read as many of them. , but I am really liking this. It's really cute.

Martha: Yeah, that, it makes sense. I have certain genres that I prefer on audio, which are fantasy or historical fiction, Regency romance type stories. I'll listen to all of that on audio, but for some reason I don't like listening to contemporary romance on audio. I've never listened to an Emily Henry on audio.

I think I prefer to use my imagination to fill in the gaps rather than having the influence of a narrator and how they the story. So I think it makes sense that you have a preference. On what type of stories you like to listen to?

 But I can't really articulate why exactly that is.

It's just a feeling.

Elizabeth: I feel a similar way. But anyway, that was a little bit of a tangent. ? What are you reading right now?

Martha: . This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal [00:06:00] L. Motar and Max Gladstone. This is one that we've talked about before on the podcast, and it is our current Fireside Book Club pick.

So I'm reading that it is a sci fi slash epistolary where two agents from different sides of a war are in communication and I won't spoil it too much but so far so good. I'm liking it. , there is not a lot of world building They just dump you into the story and in the beginning that was very discombobulating to me.

I'm like, what? I don't know what's going on. Am I stupid or am I just like, but that's I think that's the point and the further you go the more you understand and it's more about the characters and their relationship than what's going on outside of their letters. . I'm about halfway through and it's only 200 pages.

So it's a very quick read. Yeah,

Elizabeth: it's definitely not just you. We talked about it and [00:07:00] I felt the exact same way. And I think that as you read it, it's not that you really understand more about what's going on. It's more that you just get used to the fact that you're just along for the ride and you're not ever really going to totally understand what's going

Martha: a way, because you're just a fly on the wall, essentially. And how often do we get to play that role in our lives? . And then I am listening to the second book in the Morgan Le Fay series by Sophie Keach.

 I read the first one last year and it was called Morgan is My Name and , it's a feminist retelling of King Arthur and Merlin, an Arthurian story. And The second one, I'm liking it. I'm not liking it as much as the first, , similar to what you said about series. I feel like this one is just kind of like, okay, I get it.

, it's not that nothing new is happening. It's just all the same players, pretty much all the same problems, [00:08:00] , we'll see, but , I would recommend the series if you're into that sort of story, , but yeah, I think the first book was a little bit better 

Elizabeth: I wonder if that's why I actually have enjoyed those series that, focus on different characters in the world with every book instead of just continuing on with the same focus. Because, , again, I really loved , the E. V. Dunmore where each book had a different main character focus and couple focus, even though those characters exist in the other books.

 But I just read the second one in the Marlowe Murder Club series. not that long ago. And it's not that I didn't like it. It was fine. But it just felt like, yeah, I've already read this book because it's the same characters. They have slightly different things going on. But , essentially, it's the same.

story. , they solve a murder, they have some personal things that they work through together as friends, and the end, so the first book, I loved it. It was , a breath of fresh air, story about an [00:09:00] older woman, and I thought that the man who wrote it did a really great job of her POV, but now that that is established, I was like, eh.

Martha: feeling. And I think that I have a book hangover because I read all of the Housewitch books, which there were like six or seven. And nothing that I've tried to read since then has been the same feeling, you know? And it's like we talked about either you or you.

Go after the same feeling or something completely different to try and get over a book hangover and

I don't know it's nothing's really quite doing it for me.

Elizabeth: We also talked in the book hangover episode about how sometimes , and I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. Because when you have a really long series like that, you can end up with a hangover because you are so immersed in that world for so long. That then it's hard to dig yourself out or to get into any other world.

Martha: yeah, I'm definitely feeling that right now. So everything's just kind of [00:10:00] mid.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Martha: Oh,

Elizabeth: Oh, dear. Well, , speaking of things that we've done episodes on before. , our topic is not something that we've done before, but it is about bookish myths, and we're going to do some myth busting. And so the reason that I said things that we've talked about before is because, if you've been listening to the podcast from the beginning, we've busted a lot of myths about readers and books, , already, but , we're going to revisit some of those.

And then we're also going to talk about some. different myths that, , we haven't talked about before. The inspiration for this episode was, , that show Mythbusters. Do you remember that show Mythbusters, Martha?

Martha: yeah, I love that show.

Elizabeth: What channel was it? It was like Discovery,

Martha: I it was a cable TV show. So I remember it being something I'd discovered later because we didn't have cable TV. So a lot of my, peers were watching it when they were teenagers on [00:11:00] cable, but I didn't really find it until my 20s, but I loved it.

It was a great show.

Elizabeth: Yeah. I think that's around the time that it came out. So if you were in your teens, I would have been in my, mid 20s maybe, and that's when I remember watching it. , but for anyone who hasn't seen it, you should look up some clips on YouTube because it's a really funny show. But it's not about books and reading, it's basically a science myth debunking show.

And , there's these two really funny characters, the hosts, the two guys, , one of them wore a beret all the time. I don't remember, the other one was a mad scientist sort of I feel like. And they just took, common scientific misconceptions, and they would test them.

And so there was a lot of blowing things up and building machines and stuff like that. So we're not going to be doing that. But we are going to be busting some myths.

Martha: Yeah, the hosts were Jamie Heineman and Adam Savage. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. Adam and Jamie. It's all coming back to me now. And , they had different assistants as they went through the seasons. It was on for a really long time.

Martha: [00:12:00] Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: Very nostalgic. , so we came up with eight myths about books, reading, readers. And a lot of these actually came from various artificial intelligence. Apps or tools. Some of them came from chat GPT, some of them came from, , now when you Google something, the very first thing that comes up all of a sudden is their answer from their AI. Not all of them came , from that, but that some of the initial ones when we are looking these up came from those AI tools, which I thought was just really interesting, the way that these AI tools that have taken in all of human knowledge, quote unquote, are spitting back out some of these myths it was interesting.

Some of the myths they came up with, we were like, wait, those aren't myths at all. And some of them were. . I think that's probably will be a future episode for us talking about AI and its presence in the book world.

Martha: Mm hmm. Definitely.

Elizabeth: , [00:13:00] so, I think that we'll lob these myths at each other and debunk them and talk about them.

Martha: Mm hmm. Yeah, that sounds great.

Elizabeth: All right. So myth number one, Martha, bookworms are introverted. Or readers in general are anti social, don't like being around other people.

Martha: Yeah, I think this one makes a lot of sense. It would be really easy to believe that this is true because introverted people tend to like solo activities, like reading, which is typically a solo activity, unless you go to a silent book club or something like that, where you're reading with other people.

But this is, in fact, a myth. There are many kinds of people who like to read, introvert, extrovert, introverted extroverts. , I found a lot of personal blogs where people, , We're claiming that they are extroverted, but they love to read. So we have a lot of anecdotal accounts of that [00:14:00] and, , reading a book riot article, they illustrated the fact that reading has a ton of benefits for all sorts of people.

Everyone can benefit from reading and we've talked about this on the podcast before, just to summarize some of the benefits of reading, it makes you relax. It helps you with your memory. It makes you more empathetic and so on. So if you're an extrovert or an introvert, it doesn't matter. You can benefit from reading. And obviously all types of people are readers.

Elizabeth: Absolutely, that makes sense. I also think that this myth partially comes from people misunderstanding, or maybe not totally misunderstanding, but exaggerating what the definition of introvert and extrovert is. Right, the way that I understand the definition of introvert and extrovert is that an introvert is someone who being around people and being social [00:15:00] drains them of energy and so they need to recharge with alone time to get their energy back after a lot of social time.

Whereas extroverts, being around people gives them energy. So , in order for them to Up their stores of energy, they need to be really social and around people, but It doesn't necessarily follow as I think that people try to say that it does that introverts don't like being around people and the extroverts do like being around people or the introverts are solitary lonely.

It's just a matter of what depletes your energy and what brings you energy. So you could be an introvert that loves to be around people. It's just that when you do it a lot, you need to also then balance that out with some alone time. Right? So yeah, I feel like that myth is twofold. It's about the reading element, but then it's also about what an introvert actually is.

Martha: Yeah. It's just using a stereotype that goes. along very well with the activity of reading [00:16:00] and making this direct link where there may or may not really be one. Not all introverts read. I feel like that's a fairly obvious observation too, that just because you're an introvert and you recharge, By being alone, there are a lot of activities, a lot of hobbies where you can do them alone and recharge as an introvert that have nothing to do with reading.

So it's , an easy connection to make, but it's obviously a myth

Elizabeth: Yeah. And a lot of extroverts, both read and don't read.

Martha: for various

reasons. 

Elizabeth: yeah, a lot of these myths just come down to, humans like to create connections to make sense of the world as in the easiest way possible. But a lot of times it's not

actually 

Martha: Yep. But it's fun to talk about.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Martha: The next one we have are book lovers are intellectual or people who read fiction aren't intellectual and people who read non fiction are serious and practical. These all kind of go hand in hand.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And this one for me, feels [00:17:00] like that this sort of umbrella myth that we have talked about so often on the podcast about the social baggage that comes along with reading and the idea that , some types of reading are a moral activity that, , make you a certain type of person, right?

 We've definitely talked about book lovers as intellectuals. We were just talking about reading contemporary romance, and there are lots of people on BookTok and Bookstagram who lean into the fact that their reading is purely for entertainment, and it's not something that they take overly seriously.

And then, of course, there are also people who do read for their entertainment. intellectual purposes and who do take themselves seriously and they're reading seriously. And I think it again comes down to there are all sorts of people that read for all different types of reasons. The second part of this though, about there being different types of reading, like [00:18:00] fiction isn't good for you and doesn't make you intellectual and nonfiction does make you intellectual, serious, practical.

, that one is really interesting because 

in the episode called Do Genres Help or Hinder Your Reading? I don't know if you remember, Martha, our whole conversation in that one because it was a long time ago at this point, but I found a lot of different academic research into the benefits of reading and a lot of the studies.

did isolate out specific genres, and treated nonfiction as a genre as well. And so that was the one where we talked about all of those studies with the eyeball test, the empathy test, , where they would have people read a passage a book. of writing. So they did passages of literary fiction in one study, , passages of different types of fiction in another study.

They mixed in nonfiction in the literary, , fiction study as well. And, what we were trying to debunk in that episode was that literary fiction is better for you, quote unquote, than other genres of fiction. [00:19:00] But what we didn't talk about as much, but also was a result of those studies, is that, the benefits that they were claiming that one of the studies was claiming you only get from literary fiction, but that we found that all of the studies that use that eyeball test proved that you are proved, but showed that you get it, you get those benefits of, , greater empathy and creativity and all that stuff.

You get that from any genre of fiction, , more than you get it from reading nonfiction. So actually, depending on what benefit you're talking about, you actually benefit more. from reading fiction than you do from reading nonfiction. So I think that's just really interesting because there is that stereotype that people who read nonfiction are doing it, to better themselves and are doing it because it's quote unquote good for you and it, makes you, you smarter and has more benefits than fiction.

But actually, depending on what benefits you're talking about, fiction, has more benefits than nonfiction. But I [00:20:00] think that it just comes down to, you know, Read what you enjoy, right? It doesn't make you a certain type of person to read a certain type of book It's just that that's what you enjoy

Martha: Yeah, . , it's so silly, too, because there's so many different kinds of nonfiction, but it seems like that's never really talked about. There's self help books, there's parenting books, there's memoirs, there's biographies, there's true crime stories, you know, it's like, what kind of nonfiction are we talking about here, people?

Elizabeth: Yeah, totally. 

Martha: so much. And this coincides so well with the reading doorways conversation, Nancy Pearl's theory about reading doorways, where there are different, , characteristics of a book that are usually predominant language, story, setting, and character, we usually have an affinity toward one or a [00:21:00] couple of of those reading doorways, what we enjoy.

And it doesn't mean that if you prefer story over language, that you're not as smart as someone who prefers language over story or setting or something like that. It's all just a preference. And I have to remind myself of that sometimes when I read more literary books, and I'm like, uh, you know, because I am a big story reader.

I like. Fast paced stories, I'm not as into savoring the language and what does this make me feel and, , the poetry of the prose, so to speak. It doesn't mean I'm stupid. It's just what I prefer, 

Elizabeth: yeah. Yeah, and it's where we get into, the shoulding. , don't should all over your reading. There's no should in reading. , it's not like you should be reading this, you should be reading that. , all you should be reading is what you enjoy. Because when you start shoulding all over it, then you stop reading as much.

And that defeats the purpose of any of the [00:22:00] benefits, right? The other thing that you just said also about the reading doorway is, It sort of gets to what we were talking about with fiction versus nonfiction, what you were talking about, about how there's lots of different types of nonfiction. Because someone who likes a story doorway and likes thrillers probably also would like a true crime book, nonfiction.

And someone who is a character reader is going to like fiction that is character driven and they're going to like memoir probably, so that line between fiction and nonfiction , is not as cut and dried as I think the people who buy into the stereotype want to make it seem. In my research that I did, , that we also have an episode about, , into the leisure reading habits of university students at various different campuses, , I talked to students at 10 different college campuses.

And I did separate out fiction genres from non fiction genres, but actually that wasn't a huge finding in my study because what I found was there wasn't really the type of bifurcation between people who read fiction and people who don't read fiction that I would think I was. [00:23:00] expecting.

That's why I put the genres in there and broke them down so granularly. But actually, most of the people that I talked to read some fiction genres and some nonfiction. And the results for the other questions, when you cross tabulated the data from the other questions with what genres they read, , there weren't very many genres where was any type of statistically significant difference.

So, yeah, it's just, that's just a myth through and

Martha: Mm hmm. 

Elizabeth: nonfiction versus fiction thing. All right, our next myth, ebooks and audiobooks are inferior to physical books and don't count as reading.

Martha: Oh,

Elizabeth: we think about this

Martha: well, we did our very first episode about this myth, so we definitely have some thoughts. It's definitely a myth. It's not true, although people love to debate this on the internet. So it's always around.

It seems like it's never gonna go [00:24:00] away. I found a great blog post from Libro FM. There is a passage where the author states that there are cognitive differences in the processes that happen when we read with our eyes versus our ears.

However, the skills that we are able to utilize through reading an audio book are monumental in building further reading success. And research has shown that the cognitive processes are surprisingly similar. Listening to audiobooks can provide many of the same cognitive benefits as reading print books, including , improved vocabulary, comprehension, and critical thinking skills. So the way that we're digesting the story might be different, but the benefits we get from the story, either listening or reading with our eyes. seem to be the same, or at least very similar. Audiobooks [00:25:00] also help with accessibility for people with disabilities. And like we talked about in the audiobook episode, you would never go up to someone who couldn't physically read a print book and tell them that they had not read a book because they listened to it on audio.

 That seems so absurd.

Elizabeth: I mean, I guess some people on the internet might, but certainly not if you're a reasonable person.

Martha: Right, or a kind and compassionate and empathetic person.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

This question really is one of the main questions that. That was the impetus of us starting this podcast, 

Martha: Mm hmm. 

Elizabeth: I was getting ready to do that research I was just talking about. And I was practicing my questions on you, and you kept saying that you weren't a reader.

But then you would tell me about all these audiobooks that you had been reading, and I was like, hold on a second. And you were like, well That's not really reading, is it? I'm like, yes, it is. It is. So , this one has a near and dear place to my heart. And in exactly what you said, [00:26:00] the research that we looked at in that first episode, Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?

If you haven't listened to it, that's what it's called. In the research we looked at in that first episode, I remember that there were several studies that, what I could glean from the discussion of their results was that the cognitive processes and the synapses that are firing , when you're listening to an audiobook versus when you're reading a physical book, there are some differences, but there's also a lot of overlap.

And I remember one article that we are reading was basically talking about how the differences are not. Something to hang your hat on, they're really just not important enough to warrant the amount of debate and conversation that this seems to garner for

Martha: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: And I feel like it just all goes back to a lot of what we're talking about with a lot of these myths, which is people imbuing reading with all of this.

moral and social baggage and just shoulding all over people when they talk [00:27:00] about how they enjoy reading. And I just hate it because it turns reading into this thing that people somehow feel like there's a right and a wrong way to do.

And it can be intimidating. 

Martha: yeah, or you're better than someone because you read that in a print book and they listen to it. So that means that you're somehow more intellectual than they are, you know?

Elizabeth: Right. Yeah.

Martha: It's just silly. 

Elizabeth: it's, it's really silly. And it also just occurred to me how silly it is because I think that anyone who values reading and thinks that reading is a good thing would say that parents should, that it's good for parents to read to their kids before their kids are able to read. So, what's the difference between a parent reading a book to their kid and all the benefits that the kid gets from that, and someone listening to an audiobook?

I mean

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: You know, why is that? [00:28:00] Because they're not able to read yet, but , once you're able to read, somehow that isn't beneficial anymore. It just doesn't make any logical

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: So yeah, that one is firmly in the myth

Martha: Yes. Firmly. So the next one we have is We used to do a better job of teaching children to read.

Elizabeth: Yes, well, I didn't do that on purpose, but speaking , of kids and reading, This one is really interesting because this isn't one that we've talked about on the podcast before, But I found a website that was, , from an educational perspective. That's written by and for educators, , of children.

 A lot of the research that I look at is done in academia and higher education in whatever the specialist subject is of the professor of the academic. , but this website was specifically about and from the perspective of people who are educators in , a K through 12 sett ing. And , I'm just going to say right up front, that is not my area of expertise. [00:29:00] So I actually would really welcome, any feedback or additional thoughts that people listening who are educators and who are more firmly in that world have about this.

But from what I read, , there are some myths about education and kids and reading that I found really interesting. And one of them was this one, about how we used to do a better job of teaching kids to read than we do now. And the reason that this one appealed to me to talk about is because even though I just gave this whole caveat that this isn't my expertise area, it feels very similar to me, to the question that I started my research project out with about the reading habits of university students, just slightly older young people.

Because it has that quality of The good old days were better, feel, and , things used to be better when X, Y, or Z, or that golden age feel, and I think that you probably remember when we were talking about my research, there was a lot of hand wringing that I, brought in in the introduction and then tried [00:30:00] to debunk , with the research about how , young people today don't read because of technology, because of their phones, because of the internet, whatever, all these other things that are distracting them and taking their attention away from reading.

And actually what I found is that they are reading. And I also found an article when I was doing that research from the 1980s that was saying that, TV is making it so the kids don't read. So it sort of is that, tale as old as time. And this one had a similar feel to me , that people in their anxious adulthood harken back to the time that they were a kid and say, Oh, well, things used to be better then.

So what I read on this website is that there, is nothing to this myth , that we. by most measures are doing just as well teaching kids to read today as we ever have been. The website does say that, it's not to say that we couldn't be doing better, there are challenges in the U. S.

education system with teaching kids to read, so this website, I didn't feel like it [00:31:00] was, incredibly biased on the side of saying that, , the U. S. education system is great. There's nothing to see here. There's nothing wrong, right? And it cited all of its sources, which was the part about it that I really liked.

And we'll put it on our show notes, of course. But it did say that There's been the same sort of assessment since the 1970s given to children across the country to gauge their performance on reading called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP, and student performance at the three different age levels where they test this, which is 9, 13, and 17 has not changed substantially in that time since, , the 1970s too. , And goes on to say that, depending on the age level 24 to 39 percent of students score below basic , three to seven percent score in the advanced and then the rest of the kids score in the middle , but that basically is how it's been since world war ii.

 Which is not to say that [00:32:00] There haven't been changes to the way that reading is taught in schools. , there have been changes , anyone who has kids in school now will tell you, and I, , don't have kids in school, but I have friends who have kids in schools, and we've talked about this before, that , they tend to read passages in our given set of handouts for reading, as opposed to reading a whole book.

And I think that might be one of the places where people have decided that that means that we're not doing as good of a job in teaching kids to read as we used to, but it's more just that, like any field, the field of education has , its body of research that shows. different theories and different ways to teach and to build curriculum and to hold kids attention to meet certain goals.

, and so there might be different strategies that are used, but overall this assessment that they've been giving to kids since, the mid 20th century has pretty much showed that kids are reading just as well or as poorly as they ever have. So I thought that was really interesting because I feel like I have been a little susceptible to this idea that really young kids are not Reading as well as they used [00:33:00] to, because it seems like every little kid has an iPhone and an iPad that they're on, and, , And it might actually be the case that they don't read as much in their leisure time as they used to.

, that certainly seems like it's probably true, right? Because before you had something like an iPhone or something to play on, , there might have been a better chance that you were doing something like reading a book. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't read, right? I think is , the myth part of it.

Martha: It's interesting that you brought up the way that they're teaching them with handouts or passages from books and not whole books. I went to elementary school in the 90s And I remember a reading program where I think I might have been in a mixed 4th, 5th grade class and we had a big box and you would choose the story you would read by your reading level.

So I think the teacher would tell you like, you're a blue or you're a green or whatever. They probably wouldn't tell you. What [00:34:00] it meant , but it would be coded and , you would go to this box, you would pick out for your reading level. And I remember them being short. , they were short passages.

It wouldn't be a whole book, but it's not about the length of the story. It was more about the content of it and how difficult it was. So it seems like a strategy that's probably been around. It's just like you said, , we always want to think about the glory days and how things used to be. And we do this in politics.

We do this in culture. We do it all over the place. Mother, Taylor Swift. She put this into her song. I hate it here where, you know, pick a decade you'd want to live in instead of this and she'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off to the highest bid and you know people are like oh that's not fun now but it's true

Elizabeth: Not to mention the hygiene, lack of [00:35:00] antibiotics. Yeah. No, and I just, as I'm just as guilty of romanticizing, past time periods as anyone. So I say that. With a self awareness. Yeah, I think you're totally right. , and , it's interesting because I think that, it's so much about when you choose to focus your attention on these things because I don't remember ever, remember ever thinking about this or noticing.

I feel like I remember reading whole books when I was in elementary school, but it's totally possible that I was also reading handouts in the 80s. I just don't remember. And so now as an adult, I lock in on this and notice it, But, my eye hasn't been on it my whole life in the same way that it is now, whereas people who are educators are actually looking at the practices over time and looking at the research.

Let's get on to some of these other myths. So, reading is time consuming or I don't have time to read. Myth number five.

Martha: this one is so funny. It's just like anything, and we've talked about this before on another episode. I think it was , how do you read so much? And it's just about prioritizing your [00:36:00] time. People might have a misconception that it takes so long to read a book, or it's so time consuming, I wouldn't have time to do anything else.

But that's not true. There's no set amount that you have to read a day to be a reader. And in fact, , this website I found said that the average American reads or the average American reader reads about 15 minutes a day. And an avid reader spends over 40 minutes reading a day. And I think your research was similar or backed that up.

Elizabeth: Yeah, , it's hard with these time, period questions because there's no standardization. So everyone asks for different options. I think that mine was, , number of hours a week. So most of the people in my study answered three to five hours a week, which averages out to around that, like half an hour

Martha: yeah, yeah. So think about [00:37:00] how easily you could trade something like scrolling on social media or watching TV or doing another leisure activity that you tend to do every day, if you wanted to be a reader, it's just about prioritizing those 15 to 30 minutes a day. , and even if you read only one book a year, you could say you're a reader. So,

Elizabeth: yeah, and that statistic that you just cited, one thing that is pretty standardized , across the disciplines that are doing research into reading is that people who read one or more book a year are the ones who are called readers in those studies.

They don't have a higher threshold than that. If you have read a book in a year, you get called a reader in that study. So when you corrected yourself, when you were talking about the statistic, it's not. that the average person reads 15 minutes a day. It's the average reader. So that's someone who has read at least one

book. But that means that to be a reader, you just have to read a book.

Yeah. [00:38:00] And I think the key is what you just said. If you want to, right? , again, with all of these myths, there's no should here. But if you want to be a reader, you can. , the threshold is low. And it's just about practicing. It's about , Prioritizing that over something else during your day, but that's not to say that you should do that if you don't want to, right?

 There's no morality here. If you'd rather watch TV then read, then, whatever. Do whatever you want with your entertainment time. , but if it is something that you want to do, you can, if you prioritize it differently. And also, it could be time consuming. If you want to spend all of your free time reading, like I sometimes do, , I'll spend an entire weekend basically doing nothing but reading my book.

You could say that that's time consuming because it has consumed a lot of my time, but it's because that's what I've

Martha: Yeah. That was your 

Elizabeth: time. 

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Martha: Yeah. I've definitely had days where I read a whole book in one day because I couldn't put it down, but that's not the norm for [00:39:00] me At all. I mean reading 10 to 20 pages at night is closer to the norm Which only takes me like 20 minutes, , so that one's Definitely a myth.

It doesn't have to be time consuming. It's just all about how you look at it

Elizabeth: Yeah. Certainly. I'm going to throw another one at

Martha: Okay

Elizabeth: My opinion about a book doesn't matter. Why should it matter what I think about a book?

Martha: Yeah, this is a good question. I've often thought about this when I feel like I don't have anything profound to say about what I'm reading when we get on this podcast or at a book club. If I feel like, I don't have anything really important to add to the conversation. , I've wondered this, but I've also been involved in conversations where I make an observation, or someone else in the group makes an observation, and it doesn't have to be profound, but it leads us down a path where we have a great [00:40:00] conversation about the book, or about life, or the way life relates to the book, , it's like that old saying in school that they used to tell us, if you have a question.

ask because the odds are that someone else in the room has the same question, even though we want to believe we're unique. , if you have a thought, someone else probably has that thought too. So, What you think does matter and your experience reading it matters. You might share something about the book that you felt could be a potential trigger to someone, , we don't all have to be book critics to be able to talk about what we think about a book,

Elizabeth: Oh, God save us from a world where everyone is a book critic

Martha: right?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I totally 100 percent agree. And I think that. But , as we keep saying that a lot of these are related to one another, I think it's again that idea that [00:41:00] in order to be a quote unquote real reader, you have to have something serious or profound to say about your book.

, and that just is gatekeeping. It's just nonsense. Everyone can read, everyone can experience books differently. No two readers read the same book, as Nancy says. And that is the beauty of the world. And I used to labor under this a little bit too, because, we've talked a little bit about, self serious Elizabeth when I was in college.

I wanted to, have something smart to say about the books that I was reading, which were mostly literary fiction. And part of that was fed by the. environment that I was in where I was in seminar classes and we were all in our 20s and trying to impress each other and the professor and so there was a little bit of a competitive feel to those conversations that is not real in the rest of your life.

But taking those classes with Nancy, she just really encouraged us as people who are training to be librarians, we're not training to [00:42:00] be, English professors at that point. just talk about the book. Just ask questions about it. , that's what your patrons want from you, is for you to talk about the books with them.

And that doesn't mean you have, it has to be philosophical. Just , talk about the plot. Talk about why you liked it. Come up with different ways to describe what about a book appeals to you. Because all of that is helpful to your patrons that are looking to you to give them recommendations, or to lead their book club, or whatever it is.

Martha: Yeah, not every book is that deep. You might not have a single profound thing to say, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a good reading experience, so. That's definitely a myth. Okay, how about this one? Learning to read will happen naturally.

Elizabeth: So this is another one from that educational perspective that I thought was really interesting because Um, Again, I found these ones fascinating because it's not something that I've ever thought about [00:43:00] specifically, but when I read it, I was like, Oh yeah, there are a lot of people who would think that, who might think that it's common sense that the way that children can pick up language, , like they're little sponges, , and that if they're in.

an environment where they're hearing both English and Spanish spoken all the time. They'll end up speaking both languages. They don't necessarily need to be taught. , if they're never taught, they might not actually know proper grammar for the second, , language that they don't get taught, , formally, but they would be able to speak it.

And so there are some, apparently some people who argue that reading is the same. That if you're just in a literacy rich environment, where you're around books, you're around parents that read, you have a lot of reading material, kids will just pick it up. And this website is saying that that is actually completely untrue.

That learning to read is , the quote that they use , that sort of made me laugh because [00:44:00] it, it's so descriptive is that learning to read is about as natural as learning to juggle blindfolded while riding a unicycle backward.

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: So , , it's not actually something that kids or people who, , don't learn to read when they're kids, especially, , just pick up naturally. Okay. It sounds like it is easier for children to learn in the same way that it's easier for children to learn most things because their brains are a little bit more elastic , and, , like I said, soak up those skills, but it still is something that needs to be directly taught.

 Again, this isn't my expertise, so I don't want to go too far into it, but that is The basic myth and the debunking that this website, the education website, gave about

Martha: Yeah. That makes sense to me. I know living in Alaska, we have one of the highest per capita populations of private airplane pilots because it's a big state and that's one of the only ways to get around is to fly and I know people who grew up and their parents were pilots and then they [00:45:00] become pilots.

Pilots and they're great at flying because they've been around it, but they still had to learn how to fly. It's not like their parents would have just handed them the reins when they were seven years old. Like, Oh, you've been flying with me your whole life. So you know how to fly. That's just not how the world works.

So

Elizabeth: Yeah. That's a great analogy. Yeah, just because , maybe both of their parents are pilots and they've flown with them as a passenger a million times, they're not just going to be like, All right, Junior, go fly on, you know, go, go up. Go up.

Martha: That's just kind of absurd. So no, it's, it's not just going to naturally happen. That makes sense to me.

, another interesting thing that the article said is that, , a useful reminder for ourselves is that speech has evolved over , many thousands of years, right?

Elizabeth: We've been speaking for a lot longer than we've been reading, reading and writing are only about a few thousand years old, whereas speech , is , way older than that. So I think there's also something there, ,

Martha: [00:46:00] yeah, that's an interesting thought too.

Elizabeth: all right. So our last myth, number eight, some people are just genetically dyslexic. This is an interesting one.

Martha: Yeah, this one is interesting. So, according to an article I found on understood. org, where a doctor Nelson Dorda, PhD, I don't know his background or his expertise, but according to this article, he says that it's true that there is a hereditary aspect of dyslexia because it does run in families, but , 

people often think about genetics in terms of one gene being passed down from a parent to child. If a gene were associated with a condition, both parent and child would have that condition. But with dyslexia, there are multiple genes with differences, not just one. There's a lot of different genes that can impact the way that we read and [00:47:00] how people with dyslexia process and organize. The words on the page. So although it does seem like it's something that's passed down, it's not that simple that if your dad was dyslexic, of course you would be dyslexic. And it has a lot to do with, , your environment as well. Like a lot of genes do, the quality of reading instruction and, if it's caught early as a young reader to be able to help that child, , learn how to read in a way that works for them. Studies on twins have shown that reading disorder is 60 to 70 percent due to genes, but it's about 30 percent due to Mm

Elizabeth: Hmm. That is really interesting. The same website that had the educational myths on it that I've been looking at also had one about dyslexia. , a different article than the one that you're talking about, but it also, underscores what you said, but , more specifically , the people , who are writing [00:48:00] this website said that they actually find the term dyslexia to be basically meaningless because it could actually, or it does actually describe, , general difficulty with words, but that there are various specific problems that people might have that would just be thrown under that umbrella.

Some of which. might be related to these genes that you're talking about, and some of which definitely aren't. , so I thought that part was really interesting because, , there's a difficulty developing decoding skills, which would be called dyslexia, even though it's a very specific thing, whereas there is a difficulty with language comprehension that is a different problem, and that would be treated differently, , and there are others too that they list that I won't go into, but all of those would be put under the umbrella of dyslexia.

So it's, a catch all that, , makes what the actual problem is a little bit opaque. And again, it's just painting it with a little bit too broad of a brush, like you were

Martha: Yeah, that makes sense. So in that sense It is a myth that dyslexia is [00:49:00] genetic because we are just categorizing all sorts of different issues with reading or challenges with reading as dyslexia when it could be due to one of these genes or not.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and I think that depending on what the person's specific problem is, and, , their. version of it. There could be interventions, educational interventions that are really helpful and they end up, , reading perfectly at some point. Or there could be, less that those interventions can do and it's just something , that they'll just struggle with and have difficulty with.

But yeah, I thought that that one was really interesting that, again, it's similar to a lot of these that it's just so tempting for us as humans to, paint these problems with a broad brush of like, Oh, well, that's common sense. And I'm just gonna file that away as , okay, that's what that is.

Whereas really, when you look into it, it's just always so much more

Martha: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Elizabeth: All right, so those [00:50:00] are our eight bookish myths. , If you used to believe some of these before we started talking about them, don't feel bad because we both believed some. Of these. Before, before we started doing this podcast, definitely.

But even before , we did the research for this episode,

Martha: Yeah, I definitely believed that dyslexia was one thing. It was one specific thing that was definitely inherited and if you had dyslexia, you just had it and it was going to make reading harder.

Elizabeth: Yeah. , I think I would say that I probably believed that too, but only in the sense that that is just sort of the received knowledge in our society, , about dyslexia, and I just have never really interrogated it before.

Martha: What were the myths that you believed, Liz?

Elizabeth: , well, I talked a little bit about them as we were going through, but I definitely used to buy into the myth that there is such a thing as good and bad reading, good in the sense of improving worthwhile intellectual pursuit. bad, , as in [00:51:00] a sort of indulgent guilty pleasure. So , I've confessed a lot of times on this podcast at this point about how I used to solely read literary fiction, not because it was the only fiction that I enjoyed, but because it was what I thought was what a smart person read, basically.

And I just hadn't actually given a lot of other genres a chance because , I was laboring under this misapprehension or this myth that, reading something like romance was a waste of time and was a sort of guilty pleasure. , but luckily I've freed myself from that myth, , a long time

Martha: Yeah, and obviously at one point I felt like audiobooks didn't count as reading,

which I've overcome through our podcast. And we both, I think, have put pressure on ourselves at different times that we're not reading enough or that reading should be more time consuming, just going along with that myth that reading is time consuming, so, mm hmm.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Definitely. And I would say if any of these [00:52:00] myths or if several of them are particularly any listeners out there and you haven't listened to, our other episodes, most of these myths that we talked about, except for maybe the ones that are from more of an educational perspective, we have an episode about.

So if you go into our back catalog, , you'll be able to find a longer episode length treatment of that

topic. 

Martha: And there are a ton of myths related to books and reading out there. Obviously, we could only scratch the surface of this and keep this episode at a reasonable length. So, if you want a part two, if you want to hear us debunk more myths, you can send suggestions to our email at allbooksaloudpod at gmail.

com. And if we get enough interesting questions, Topics or myths to debunk. We're happy to do another one of these episodes, right, Liz?

Elizabeth: Yeah, it's fun.

Martha: For even more bookish content, follow [00:53:00] us on social media.

We're on Instagram and Tik TOK at all books, allowed pod, send us an email at all booksaloudpod at gmail. com. Make sure to leave us a positive rating and review because it helps other people find us and read on my friends.

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