Why I read as much as I do

A lot of times, people ask me how I read so much. and always, I never know what to say. The answer that I simply enjoy it never seems enough to them. It feels like a trick, because they don’t enjoy it. Last week, every day, I would stand at the bus stop and read The Lonely City, because I was enthralled by it, and it had been some time since wanted to stand at a bust stop and read even five pages of a book before I had to get to work. And as I stood there, my nose in a book, my co-workers would ask me incredulously how I did it, hold my attention and read a book with no pictures (the thought!) And as I read Laing’s account of feeling completely alone in a city, interspersed with her trying to find solidarity in the loneliness of other artists, I think, I finally found an answer which I feel like I always had, but I I’d never thought about.

So, this is an attempt at reviewing the act of reading for pleasure (ala John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed). When I think about why I read, or why I think reading is important, I think of Neil Gaiman, who has always been an advocate for reading and for supporting local libraries. He says that the very act of reading changes us, because he found when he was listening to a talk about private prisons, and how they figured out how many cells they would need fifteen years from now, they said they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure. It sounds a bit extreme, but it shows why Gaiman, and all writers really, advocate reading, because it fosters a healthy imagination.

Fiction, as most writers agree, has the ability to show us different worlds, to engender a feeling of empathy for the characters on a page. As Philip Pullman puts it, “Fairy stories loosen the chains of the imagination. They give you things to think with – images to think with – and the sense that all kinds of things are possible. While at the same time being ridiculous or terrifying or consolatory. Or something else altogether, as well.” And the ability to think that anything is possible, what about mankind be without it?

No matter who you ask, writers will tell you one thing, that reading is important. Because it gives us a sense of freedom.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. -Neil Gaiman

But, while all of this presents a great case for why we should read, I found that it didn’t help my conundrum. If I ever said all of this to the people who looked at me warily for choosing to read instead of standing vapidly waiting for the bus, they would laugh at me. The answer I found that I most liked, the almost obvious answer I hadn’t thought of till now, was of course, because it made me feel less alone. I found something so comforting and companionable in reading how Laing had been through the same upheaval I had been through, I realized I had felt this before. To know someone else, somewhere else out there, in the real world, or an imagined one, knows what its like to go through what I was going through. That is why I read, because it makes me feel less lonely, and understood.

But standing at that bus stop, I also realized, how utterly alienating it is, to have your nose buried in a book all the time.I don’t know why I felt that, maybe it was seeing everyone else joking around, but I realized I couldn’t share what I was reading with anyone else, not really. I could share the words, but I couldn’t share how they made me feel. I guess for now, I’ll take the words. I give reading for pleasure a solid 4 out of 5 stars.