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

by Shannon Reed

Two is before my memories really begin, young enough to make reading seem less a hobby and more a way of life. I breathed, I ate, I cried, I slept, I chattered, I read. And I have not stopped reading since.

Reading was always safe and always good company.

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. Reading absolutely never says “Just forget it” when I need clarification. It doesn’t care how I pronounce the words in my head (or aloud, for that matter). It never makes me feel worse and rarely makes me feel lonely. Reading gives me the world.

I’ve been going to the public library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, with my parents since before I can remember.

There are so many books out there! I refuse to be tied down to Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad or the endless titles in the Alexander McCall Smith series, no matter how excellent those series are! Live free, read free!

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,

And perhaps it’s time to revisit Anne, too, and see what I think of her in middle age, now that I’ve arrived there myself. 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.

My grave marker may someday read She read every page.

It’s the nature of assigned reading: it must be hated. We, you, I, my colleagues, all of us read because we had to, and it just about ruined reading for many of us.

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.

Of course, we were traveling in the ’80s and ’90s, long before the days of the supposedly family-oriented trips of today, in which children are apparently taken to special destinations to go on special activities arranged specifically for their pleasure. I get cranky about that. When my friends with kids worry aloud about whether their children will be properly entertained by the fifteen hundred different available activities on the kid-friendly cruise they’ve booked, 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.

Joyce’s work, like Wilder’s, glimmers with humanity even without the context. It’s so thoroughly of its time that it teaches us even without the trips, without Wikipedia, without audio of Dublin Bay. 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.

Books are sly and can crack us open.

And, of course, sad books offer us the chance to bounce back from our grief far more quickly than we can (or will or should) in real life.

me. At the end, together, we’ve walked in another person’s shoes (and cried in their hankies) and are better off for it—but we return to our own daily existence, somehow a little lighter, a fun-size chocolate bar in our pocket, a life to still be lived.

Reading is no longer a race that I might win, but a lifelong companion, a dear friend who’s always there for me but never, ever asks for a slice.

Books do have a main point after all, but it changes for each reader, and for each group of people puzzling their way to it.

When we parted, I exhorted them to keep reading Ferrante’s work, and I hope that they did. But I suspect some didn’t try, even if they wanted to.

And I hope you find that saying I gave Don Quixote a good try, but it wasn’t for me is much more empowering than saying I’m not smart enough to read Don Quixote.

“All my best friends are at the library.”

Like Carla, I’ve found many friends at the library. It hurts my heart to know some people don’t see the value in the novels she loved. Despite their efforts to ban various books, I don’t think they will succeed, because once you’ve read your Wonder, you won’t accept anything less.

Having seen yourself in a book, you’re different—represented, presented, less alone—and, moreover, you want the same for others, for everyone, too.

I truly love that reading broadens our hearts and helps us find kindred spirits from across time.

So it’s no wonder that we try to use our status as readers of difficult books to feel superior.

In a world that insists that smart people read hard books, of course we want to assert that we have done exactly that, so we must be smart.

Reading to feel superior makes reading a slog toward lowered self-esteem, because we often hate the books we think we’re supposed to love, and then start to sorta hate reading at all, because it’s that awful mix of difficult but also unrewarding.

reading should fill up the old brain hole and our hearts, too—consoling, educating, entertaining us, providing succor against life’s perpetual storms.

“What book do you think about the most? You know, like it’s running on a train track inside your head?”

I am a person of innate caution and hesitancy, but I hate you can never be too careful because it’s total bullshit. You can be too careful. You can act out of fear, a fear rooted in racism. You can overlook that the most danger you face is probably from the men you already know, and you can traumatize people who sincerely and entirely meant you no harm.

As it is on most scaredy-cats. We’re not delightfully energized by horror the way the rest of the world is; we take those images with us, and our brains offer them back at three in the morning, no catharsis to be found. We look at the way the rest of you scream, then laugh, and then relax, with envy—and, fascinated, we want in. But we can’t get in.