Nancy Pearl - Pearl On Reading and Librarianship

Pearl On Reading and Librarianship

Part of Pearl’s success with the public hinges on the idea of connecting with the reader without pretense. Pearl is not forgetting her academic background. However, she is finding material that engages the reader and gives the reader permission to enjoy the material of their choice even if it is not the standard reading that the academics say we should all know. Pearl states that readers become more demanding about the quality of material that they read as they read more material. For Pearl, it seems that the most important aspect of reading a book is to enjoy it. If a reader is not enjoying a book, then she has a rule for when to stop reading that book.

Pearl's approach to enjoying reading is the Rule of 50 which states "If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages." In her books, Pearl recommends 3,400 titles, grouped in chapters such as "Horror for Sissies" and "Good Reading from the Government (Really!)."

Pearl's program, "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" was a concept to promote literacy and to encourage community. The program was hugely successful and discussed across the nation. Many other communities began to offer similar One City One Book programs based on Ms. Pearl’s success. Her appearance on local public radio fueled her popularity as her listeners began to find books that they actually enjoyed reading. Ms. Pearl’s knowledge of books and ability to recommend the right book to the right reader, led her to gather her thoughts from her own reading, writing, and speaking into a collection of book reviews. She began publishing books about books.

Pearl says that the largest problem facing librarianship today is that "we have yet to balance the three important functions a library has in a community: information access, providing people with books and material for their recreational learning and reading, and offering quality programs for our patrons. The pendulum swung way over on the information access side and has yet to right itself. We graduate people from library schools (information schools) knowing how to build a website, but not knowing how to recommend a book to someone who comes in asking for something good to read."