With so many other entertainments competing for attention, why read books?
“Literature is a daily practice,” says Dr. Angus Fletcher, author and scholar on the science of stories. “There is no scarcity in literature. It’s always there for you. There are always enough books and there’s always enough in books.”1
As family legend goes, I learned to read at the age of three and then dazzled my relatives by reading my own cards aloud at my fourth birthday party. We always had books in the house, and my parents read to us as kids, but they say they didn’t make a concerted effort to teach me. Something about the shapes of letters on the page, the way they fit with the sounds in our mouths, and their symbolic relationship to objects, feelings, people, and places all just made sense to my porous brain, eager to learn. For what has been essentially my entire life, reading has been a place that feels easy and safe to me.
I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that my early reading abilities determined the course of my life. According to my parents, their decision to keep me at home instead of send me to kindergarten was based on it. “What would they have done with you? You already knew how to read,” is the line I attribute to my mum when I tell this story. Skipping kindergarten turned into staying home for first grade, then second grade, then 12 years of homeschooling, and eventually, a roundabout route to my Bachelor’s degree despite not having a high school diploma. My three-year-old self had no idea of the path she was setting me on by picking up so many Dr. Seuss stories.
As I got a little older, I did my chores (poorly) with a book in one hand or propped a volume in front of my face at the dinner table, until this was outlawed. I did as I was told and went outside to get some fresh air and play with the other kids - only to sit on the swing set or lay in the grass with my book. We went to the lake in the summer and I read on the blanket while my sister found other playmates to dig in the sand with her. Being homeschooled meant that my days had so many free hours, unburdened by time spent - wasted, I thought - on the school bus or in a crowded classroom. My proudest accomplishment was in 2002, when I read 100 books in the month of May. I wrote down the complete list of titles on a piece of coloured paper with a glittery pastel gel pen (again: it was 2002).
For what has been essentially my entire life, reading has been a place that feels easy and safe to me.
In my teenage years, I turned from children’s mysteries and historical fiction to The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. I left the Young Adult section of our local library and started in on the books for adults. But being homeschooled and having all that free time to read also meant that I had never needed to be intentional about finding it. As soon as I started my post-secondary studies, my reading slowed; by the time I graduated, I didn’t read for pleasure much at all. Moving country and then starting a career didn’t help. With all my early 20s hubris, I felt I was becoming someone else and this new person wasn’t much of a reader after all. Over the past decade, I’ve occasionally picked up a book that excited me, but I’d guess that I didn’t read more than five books a year - ten at most.
A year ago, pandemic barely dawning, I set myself a goal of reading 18 books by the end of 2020. This felt like a stretch, considering my track record in recent years. I was a long way off from those 100 books in May 2002. But I made it through 20 books in 2020, and more importantly, I loved doing it. At Christmas, my brother gave me a beautiful edition of Pride and Prejudice, supplemented by handwritten replicas of the letters that characters exchange throughout the book. My first thought on opening the gift was, “This is a blast from the past - I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice since I was a teenager. Is it really my thing anymore?” Yes, it is; I just read it this week and it was like a homecoming.
The more I read, the more I’m reminded of the safety and ease that I find in it, and the more I feel like myself.
Angus Fletcher continues: “You can never exhaust a book’s ability to give its gifts to you: its love, its empathy, its healing. You can always go back to it. It has that kind of infinite capacity.” This is what I’m finding by going back, wholeheartedly, to books. The more I read, the more I’m reminded of the safety and ease that I find in it, and the more I feel like myself.
I set a conservative goal for my reading in 2021, which I think I’ll outstrip by June. I didn’t want to put pressure on myself, but making space for reading gives me more than it takes. The generosity of reading isn’t just in the contents of the books, it’s in the act. Books are good for distraction and imagination, community-building and ritual-making. Maybe best of all, they keep hands full so there’s no place for a smartphone.
I, for one, am already convinced, but I like the rest of what Angus Fletcher had to say:
“Once you know where to go to find this healing from books, you can always find it there. It will always be there, for the rest of your life, whenever you need it. [ … ] You have options and opportunities to say, ‘This is what I want in my life now,’ or ‘This is what I need more of now.’ But whenever you need it, you know you can go to literature and get it at that time. When you need joy, you can get joy. When you need optimism, you can get optimism. When you need healing, you can get healing. When you need courage, you can get courage. There’s an inexhaustible supply.”
Unsolicited Recommendations
In keeping with the raving about books, a couple of things that are feeding my enthusiasm for reading:
The Story Graph. This alternative to GoodReads has a much smoother interface, cool data analysis features, and isn’t owned by Amazon. Win win win.
YouTuber Leena Norms. She has a background in publishing and an infectious love of books. Most of her book recommendations end up saved in my “to read” list on The Story Graph.
The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser. A lovely essay for in-between books. Plus, the song by The Decemberists runs through my head whenever I read the title.
Questions to Ask in a library.
This, along with the other quotes from Angus Fletcher, I pulled from his interview with Brené Brown on her podcast, Unlocking Us.