Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us”. I once shared this sentence with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.

We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she got out of her chair to take a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”

But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent neighborhoods. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic —the giving way of dreams to fate.

For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school-one that often attracts the literary-minded children of Manhattan’s upper classes into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her develop better in high school, where they would unavoidably meet, perhaps for the first time, students who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph.D.’s.

Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The students didn’t always read from the expected point of view.

About The Red Pony, one student said, “it’s about being a man, it’s about manliness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical view was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their first year in college as a result of the classes.

Year after year, however, we are increasing the number of practice tests. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, not for emotional punch but for text complexity. Yet, we cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that ignore their hearts. We are teaching them that words do not amaze but confuse. We may succeed in raising test scores, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.

For the kids who have just started to read, choosing the right books is essential and their parents should be there to help them.

A proper book classification system would be of great help in this regard, since most parents do not know which books suit their children’s reading levels the most. An effective classification system for children’s books would help overcome this problem.

Chinese bookstores, online or offline, still prefer to use age rather than reading ability to categorize what they sell. In fact, reading ability and interests vary from child to child even when they are at the same age. This early form of classification is accepted by most bookstores and publishers, yet many young readers get books that are nowhere near their targeted reading levels.

China has at least 200 million children under the age of 14, and their enthusiasm for reading has increased over the years. The publishers of children’s books should try to introduce a juvenile-centered classification system to help their readers choose books that are suitable for their reading abilities.

Some don’t trust the call for more effective book classification, mentioning the need for youngsters to read extensively and avoid restricting themselves to one or two categories. There is a strong case for resisting selective reading, but not book classification, which is designed to help young children develop good reading habits and hold onto them in the long run.

Studies have found that kids are less likely to be into reading if they have not developed such a habit before the age of 10. That said, it is in their best interests to adopt targeted reading during childhood, as this can greatly improve their comprehension abilities. So greater efforts should be put into designing a book classification system that meets the needs of young readers.

The Best Way to Enjoy a Book

I am no slow eater. I can’t remember the number of times I was told as a child not to gobble my food. Nor have I been a slow reader. I went through books like combine harvesters through crops in the English village of my childhood.

Perhaps I will continue to gobble my food until my last meal on this planet. But books! They are an entirely different matter. Having been prevented from visiting bookstores and libraries during these days of isolation. I have decided to make changes. After all, didn’t someone once say, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”

I imagine slow reading to be like slow cooking: a variety of ingredients mixed into something one can truly enjoy. Slow reading means enjoying each sentence, absorbing all of those paragraphs of description that had probably been sweated over by the author and, more often than not, skipped over by readers like me.

This isn’t to say I pay only random attention to a book. Before deciding on one to buy or borrow, I always read the synopsis and the “About the Author” section. I would also read the dedication, the foreword and the author’s acknowledgments. Only then do I move on to the book’s opening sentence. This is essentially how I had selected the two books that I most recently finished.

In order to truly enjoy these two novels, I rationed my reading to two hours a day-no more and no less. A funny thing happens when you take two hours out of the day - every day – for something you really, really enjoy. I experienced a quiet sense of accomplishment that I had missed for years.

English writer Kate Atkinson’s Transcription has been advertised as “a novel of rare depth from one of the best writers of our time.” Award-winning Newfoundler Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, meanwhile, is said to be “a richly imagined and fascinating story of hardship and survival.” I am glad I didn’t read Transcription at my usual pace. I suspect I would have missed much of the brilliance of the writing. Instead, I made myself completely involved in the life of 18-year-old Julie. I often paused at the end of a chapter to reread it for the joy of laughing aloud at the heroine’ observations.

The Innocents is about the life of two orphans in an isolated bay in Newfoundland. It was hard not to run through this powerful narrative—but I resisted the temptation. My patience was rewarded with a deeper understanding of the character and rich description of northern Newfoundland— so real that I could almost feel the lichen (地衣) between my toes.

So here I am, two books finished that took me a month to read. I have been entertained, enriched and transported in time and place like I never have before. Having discovered the joys of taking my time over a book now, I doubt I will ever again announce proudly, “It only took me a day or a couple of hours to finish!”