Vadim Levin read Daniel Pennack’s book Like a Novel for us.
“This little book is called Like a Novel and reads like a novel. Its author is a writer and teacher who loves literature and knows how to open the joy of reading to children. He is one of the main characters in this book. The second hero is me, the reader, who needs to understand why modern children do not want to read. My conclusion is obvious: the book requires understanding, mental tension, and films, television, computer games are perceived by the eyes, effortlessly. But author Daniel Pennack disagrees with the obvious!
He intervenes in my reasoning and quotes: “Reading is the scourge of childhood and almost the only occupation that we find for him … The child is not very interested in perfecting the instrument with which he is tormented …” This was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, when cinema and there was no computer yet. It turns out that my accusations of the era are self-justification. Probably, I did not do something so that the child was carried away by reading, enjoyed it. But what exactly am I supposed to do? Pennack the teacher does not give methodological instructions: children and situations are so diverse that there are no enough recipes for all occasions.
He takes me back to the nursery where I read a bedtime story to my child. We rejoice in it together. And to each other! We are good together. And then our triple union (child – adult – book) for some reason breaks up. Why? Think. In the meantime, the writer Pennack invites me to teacher Pennack’s class. There are thirty-five teenagers in the class, expelled from central schools for poor performance. “It goes without saying that they don’t like to read. Too many words in books. Pages too. And there are just too many books.
I get to know these different teenagers and feel that they are all nice to me, although they are ruffy, and even rude. And after a dozen pages they are already passionate about reading. Yes, I saw with my own eyes how they became and became readers. Pennak knows the joy of reading and knows how to share it. Can I?..
He disagrees with the obvious! But he knows the joy of reading and knows how to share it
Daniel Pennak’s book is not only fascinating and generous with good feelings. She is instructive. But he teaches not with advice, but with questions that arise when reading. I really want to return one of them to my fellow teacher: “Is it really inevitable to lose a reader in a child, so that later in a teenager you can nurture him again?”
About the author of the book
Daniel Pennac – a famous French writer, worked for many years as a teacher of literature in a regular school in a residential area of Paris. His books have been translated into 26 languages, and the (anti)pedagogical essay “Like a Novel” has upended established ideas about how literature should be taught so that children want to read. D. Pennak “Like a novel”, Samokat, 160 p.