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

by Shannon Reed

In writing this book, I’ve come to realize perhaps the most important reason I’ve remained so: the act of reading makes me feel safe. Not the book itself—paperback, hardcover, e-, I truly do not care—but the exercise of running my eyes over the words. The translation from symbol into meaning. The direct, pleasant diction of the voice inside my head. The influx of information. The transport to other lives, other worlds.

I liked people, but outside my family and close friends, I found them stress-inducing.

Agree.

Reading a book is quiet, clear, and organized. It’s not hard. It waits until I am ready, pauses when I need a break, and is still happy to repeat.

I love it there, and long with all of my stubborn little heart to be allowed to take out more than two or three books at a time, since I must share my mom’s account and there is a book limit.

I put the card in my otherwise completely empty Snoopy wallet, treasuring the expanse of books, and life, ahead of me.

I always choose carefully, due to that limit, for the books have to sustain me for seven full days, until we return. I favor thick books, which make for longer reading. I am against pictures in books, which do not.

At other times, I listen to the patrons’ compliments and complaints; in the days before a reserve system, there’s a lot of grousing that the latest Scott Turow or John Grisham is never in.

On those days, I sometimes walk down the hill to our house in the twilight feeling like I’m simply traveling from one home to another.

Although I had (and continue to have) no particular reason to assume that the library Paley uses as her setting is the Jefferson Market Branch, I always picture it so, and thus, this story is one of my very favorites, in the way one loves stories about one’s home.

Realize two hours later that I am reading Bel Canto for the seventeenth time.

Everything is sharp when there’s nothing to pull your attention away: the phone doesn’t ring, no one yells for you to please come downstairs for dinner, and the television down the hall is silent since your father’s finally finished watching the game. You’re the only one still awake.

You’re still so young, and these lost hours of sleep can be easily absorbed into your day. You’ll be more tired than usual, but no one expects much of you, and you can still cry in the midafternoon for no real reason, half from fatigue, half because the book was over too quickly.

This time you’ll stop reading at 9:00 p.m., fifty pages in, aware, even in your youth, that you cannot pull too many late-nighters in a row.

And you’ll want an escape, so you’ll root around on the bedroom floor for the book and open it, imagining the crack of other book spines all over town, a dozen of you, more, reaching for an evening companion this dark, long night.

It was a time of unfettered, unhinged reading, of passing every moment in two lives, one my actual lived existence, and the other wherever my book took me. I miss it. People seem to expect my complete attention so much more often now.

I read most of the Nancy Drews, too, and only skipped the Hardy Boys because my grandmother told me that they were mostly about “camping and other boy things.”

All of Goosebumps, the Baby-sitters Club books, Sweet Valley High’s shenanigans, or—naughty!—the V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic series.

I fret about series still being written: fingers crossed for all of you reading the Game of Thrones books! Good luck, ye Sassenach Outlander readers! May those landings, if they ever arrive, stick.

Series can bore with their zombified obligation to keep going, failing to sense when they should have ended.

Breadth and depth are not the same, after all, and I don’t want to be the kind of reader who only skims and never delves, so the minute I finish writing this paragraph, I’m going to order up a copy of Tudors, the next book in Ackroyd’s series.

After all, the undisputed pleasure of a series is returning to the familiar, in order to see how you yourself have and have not changed.

To Mildly Startle a Mockingbird

I’m Going to Tell You Why the Caged Bird Sings: It Will Not Be a Mystery to You for Much Longer, Deep Breaths

Nothing kills the experience of reading a good book more than having to answer questions about who the main character is, what his motivation might be, and what the giant glasses symbolize.

I kept right on reading anyway, learning to think of making my way through the assigned books as something I had to do, while actual, real reading remained a pleasure.

Many of my students tell me that’s what they’ve done, too. They arrive in my class eager to learn to write books even though they no longer like to read them (or so they think). At best, they, like me, have tacitly learned to split their reading into the categories of Assigned Reading and Reading I Actually Enjoy. At worst, they don’t read much of anything at all.

But this is not a perfect world, Candy Crush has too many levels to ever be conquered, and I know that I myself haven’t gotten around to reading many worthy books without being assigned them.

Reading is a solitary pursuit, by nature, but the pleasure of discussing what one has read is deeply collective, the reason why we seek out book clubs, press a novel we enjoyed into a friend’s hands, and jet to review sites to warn others away from (or beckon them into) a book.

Read whatever you like, books about railroads or by Real Housewives, romances set in quaint New England towns in the fall, mysteries in which Queen Elizabeth II somehow stops a murder in between the whole being-queen thing. Tom Clancy. Danielle Steele. Whatever. Just keep reading.

as I discovered with The Grapes of Wrath, I very rarely can accurately predict what I’ll get out of a book—pleasure, joy, education, insight, disgust, boredom—until I actually read it.

It’s pretty fun to go back into those supposedly staid classics and find all of that out. So many of them were unconventional and unique in voice and scope, a lovely reminder that the conventional, traditional, and staid is not necessarily what lasts.

Frankly, you do not want to read about two hormonal teenagers who never had to take the garbage out or even remember that it’s Tuesday at all.

As a former high-school teacher who’s fully aware books get taught for all kinds of reasons, I’m very wary of the commonly held belief that the classics are the classics for a reason.

But to assign yourself some reading is an opportunity to avail yourself of the better elements of classic literature: the beauty of the prose in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the unique insights of the author in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, or, as with Beowulf, a glimpse of the impact the story has made throughout the years, decades, or centuries it has been in our culture. It may be worth your time.

Already cowed by the number of rules about reading, we meekly buy into every publishing company’s marketing campaign.

Preferences are not rules. Everyone gets to have their own preferences, and no one’s preferences, not even the preferences of Tom Hankolas, serve everyone else!

it’s extremely unlikely that any of us will become so famous that our home library will be donated to the Smithsonian, like Julia Child’s kitchen, so why would it possibly matter that we sometimes use a pen to make notes in books we own?

No one else is concerned about the swooning, which is not a thing that twenty-first century people actually do.

Your favorite song is the only one anyone remembers from your time period.

I recollect us driving across Iowa with only the Corn Palace to look forward to,2 expected to entertain ourselves for hours without phones or DVD players.

My favorite of the series was Farmer Boy, the only book in the series not actually about Laura.

Side quest.

Although there are wonderful scenes of simple holidays, community dances, and delicious food, Wilder’s books are also full of toil, danger, and disease, the stuff of the pioneer life.

Perhaps because I connected to Laura’s frustrations over getting her stitches straight and small, I completely missed the issues of class and poverty just visible underneath the surface of the Little House books, the way the Ingallses were almost always on the edge of abject poverty.

Wilder’s narrator made it sound as if the family lived in a hole in the ground, but I knew that could not possibly be correct. People lived in houses.

But Williams’s fantasia bore no resemblance to what we were staring at. Without the sign, we wouldn’t have found it. It wasn’t even a hole, really, just a sort of depression. Retrospectively, I grasp that the hole must have been closed up over the years. The slump I could barely locate without my dad’s help must have once offered access to an earthen room large enough to offer shelter and bed pallets. But all I could picture were moles, tunneling around in the earth.

the first thing Pa does when his family arrives at Plum Creek (having left behind their little house on the prairie) is trade for two horses, horses being more important than not living in a hole in the ground. Then, he buys lumber and wheat seed on credit (also more important than vacating the hole for a house) in hopes that a good crop will allow him to pay this back.

I understood Ma’s constant undercurrent of fear and worry. I better grasped why Laura and Mary, who must have been bedraggled and dirty, were targets of Nellie’s cruel bullying.

In Bath, England, we saw the fancy homes and insularity of the small city, the backdrop for Jane Austen’s shenanigans in Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. The houses stood so close together, I could finally comprehend how gossip and innuendo traveled at warp speed without telephones.

All writers were once children who had to grow up in a particular place and time, who eventually wrote from that background.

Context offers ways in (and, perhaps, ways out) of these stories, but the stories are the actual point. When they’re good, they reveal us back to ourselves. When they’re great, we gasp with recognition, across the centuries: those people, we think, they’re like we are now.