Jacqueline Guest has the answer to one of life’s biggest mysteries.
The secret to success, it seems, is reading.
“It’s the most important thing you are ever going to learn to do,” said Guest, whose latest young adult novel, Outcasts of River Falls, was a hit with more than 800 students Friday at the Festival of Trees staged at the Canadian Lakehead Exhibition grounds.
“You will never do a quadratic equation again when you leave school. But you will read.”
Alan Silberberg, author of Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze, calls reading a virus, a bug he hopes spreads throughout the world at epidemic speed.
“Soon the whole town becomes contagious and everybody loves books. That’s why we’re here. We love books,” said Silberberg, whose silly, serious novel won the Silver Birch Award on Friday, the favourite of local students in an Ontario-wide competition.
As a writer, Silberberg said it’s great to see so much enthusiasm about reading by so many students. The reception was a lot like he imagines rock stars are greeted everywhere they go.
“The energy in that room was so intense and wonderful,” he said. “It’s going to keep me going for a long time as a I sit in my basement writing all by myself.
“It means so much to me to know the kids are responding to this book especially, because it’s a very personal story and it’s both a funny book and a sad book. And the fact that kids could generate enough enthusiasm and want to read a story like that, really means a lot to me.”
Illustrator and novelist Kevin Sylvester, a former CBC radio sports reporter, believes books are the gateway to a whole new world of exploration, one that children should be exposed to early and often.
But while encouraging kids to read is a bit of self-preservation for those in the writing business, Sylvester would do it regardless of what he did for a living.
It’s just that important, he said.
“When you open the cover of a book, you’re opening the door to an imaginary world. And kids, to have their brains creative – they create the view of that world when they read it – it makes them smarter,” Sylvester said.
Children learn things in many different ways, from non-fiction works to what they pick up in the classroom, but there are plenty of other ways for them to foster their own intelligence, he said.
“When a kid reads a book, it makes them think about the world in a different way. It makes them create and it makes them think differently than they did before they read the book. That’s a hugely important value in our world, whether you grow up to be an accountant, a writer or whatever.”
Getting youngsters to read these days isn’t like it used to be, when radio and TV were the only competition – or didn’t even exist.
But while a book might not be as sexy or exciting as a video game like Call of Duty, Sylvester said they’ll never go away because of everything they offer.
“I think that for kids, when they read a book, when they’re supported, when they are read to at an read to at an early age (it sticks),” he said, comparing reading to listening to a baseball game on the radio.
“On television they tell you what to watch. In a video game you’re playing with someone else’s imagination. You’re playing along in someone else’s imagination. If you read a book, you are actually creating.”
June Rysinski, a teacher/librarian with the Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board, said a celebration like the Festival of Trees is just what kids need to find a love of books and other written works, starting them on what she hopes is a life-long love affair with reading.
“We’re all about reading,” she said.
“We enjoy books and we love when our students talk about the books that they read. But most of all we love when the students celebrate the books, like they have been today.”
