Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

by Shannon Reed

I don’t think I know a single fellow Lutheran who didn’t make their way through the Chronicles of Narnia around age ten.

Excluding me and the other three people who became educators, I bet that no one from my class has made much use of the skill of correctly answering worksheet questions over the last thirty years. And I also bet that the four of us have mostly used that skill to... write more worksheet questions. I tend to be skeptical of the idea that every task undertaken in high school should directly tie to a necessary adult competency, but those worksheets also didn’t enhance or build our love of reading, or our appreciation for literature, or our understanding of the human condition. They were busywork.

I assigned deeply personal works. Jennifer Sinor’s “Confluences.” Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale.” An excerpt from Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” And Brent Staples’s “Black Men and Public Space.”

Read these.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, a 2014 nonfiction bestseller by the writer and doctor Atul Gawande,

Read this