Why read?

On Reading

I love reading. If I can confidently claim that I have even a smidgen of common sense, I think it’s all down to reading. The more I read, the more I felt the urge to write. And in a sense, even that activity is due to reading. Reading has been the fountainhead of common sense in my life.

I don’t read as much as I’d like to, but I still read a little. I still mentally lick a fair number of books and articles. And whenever a book is good, I grope it even.

Over time, I developed a fascination with the very act of reading itself. Why should one read? Are people reading books? If they aren’t, then what are they reading? And if reading is in secular decline, as it’s often claimed, what does that do to people and to society at large? These are some questions I’ve been wrestling with for a while now.

Why should one read?

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have given you some bullshit answer like: it’ll make you smart, it’ll make you wise, it’ll give you answers to life’s questions. But since then my answer has changed, because I realized those earlier answers were vapid and clichéd.

Ed Seykota, the trader, once said: “Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the markets.” I think the same applies to reading. Everybody gets something out of it. It may be what they want, or it may not be, but reading always touches you in some way. I mean that in a value-neutral, meaning-neutral sense.

So when I think about why one should read, my answer now is: one should read books because [insert reason] and the blank is to be filled in by the individual reader. Reading is not a monolith. Reading is not the same for everybody.

Heraclitus once said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”

The same applies to readers. No two readers are the same, and no reader will ever be the same after reading a book. Reading is an individual pursuit, an act of solitude. What a book does to someone will always be unique to that person. Reading might be universal, but the experiences it creates are not.

Harold Bloom and the act of reading

This loose shitty soliloquy was inspired by a Harold Bloom interview with Charlie Rose I stumbled across on YouTube. It was brilliant.

https://youtu.be/FCwdltKoqPg?si=jH40uB6JKVW3Fk3e

Some of what Bloom said I agreed with wholeheartedly. For example: if you don’t read, you can’t think. And if all you read is mediocre stuff, you won’t be able to think well. If that continues, we may one day cease to be a democracy. That rings true. A democracy is just a collection of people, and its robustness is tied to the quality of thought of its citizenry.

He also said that unless a person reads and explores their own interests, they will never reach the deeper recesses of the self. They won’t learn self-trust or self-reliance, and they won’t heal the self. I think that’s a very evocative way to frame what reading does to us.

Another point I liked was his emphasis on memorization. Not rote memorization, but the kind where you understand something deeply and carry it with you—like reading a poem a hundred times because it can sustain a hundred readings. That struck me. It reminded me of a Substack post by Adam Roberts where he wrote: “Attention is the first philosophy.”

Of course, there were parts I didn’t agree with. Like many critics today, Bloom lamented that screens—TV, movies, computers—were ruining the young. Remember, this was twenty years ago. I’m still not convinced screens or digital tech are ruining the act of reading. I’ve got a tentative working theory on that, but that’s for another time.

Rose: So what’s happened to us that gives us that kind of society in which people of the best young minds have not read?

Harold Bloom: Well, the screen. The screen, the screen. Television screen, movie screen, the television screen, the movie screen, and now overwhelmingly, computer screen, and yes, in particular, the great gray ocean of the Internet, which frightens me deeply because if young people go into, or onto, whatever the proper terminology is, since I’m a dinosaur and know nothing about the Internet, but I know just enough about it to know that to differentiate between something in that vast and endless floating sea of stuff.

I also disagreed with his dismissal of Harry Potter. He was annoyed that it had sold 35 million copies at the time, and he didn’t consider reading it to be “reading.” He called it “just an endless string of clichés… I cannot think that does anyone any good.”

Charlie Rose: How do you choose? Better yet, how do you recommend people choose what they read?

Harold Bloom: Well, to some degree, of course, one would like to feel that they ought to follow their own nature, but these days, that leads to all kinds of difficulties. One cannot be happy about the 35 million copies of Harry Potter. I had a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.

No, I… I think that’s not reading, because there’s nothing there to be read. They’re just an endless string of clichés. I cannot think that that does anyone any good. I mean, people tell me, “Well, at least the child is reading,” to which my answer is, “No, the child isn’t reading.” That’s not The Wind in the Willows, that’s not Through the Looking Glass, that’s not Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, or James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks. That’s not really children’s literature. It’s really just sloth, and I do not think it does anyone any good at all.

Charlie Rose: Okay, but then what are you saying? I mean, are millions and millions and millions of people wrong?

Harold Bloom: I’m afraid so, you know.

This strikes me as classic literary snobbishness. Sure, Bloom was a scholar of Shakespeare, but I think he was wrong here. Reading Harry Potter may not be Shakespeare, but it still does something. It sparks imaginations, opens doors, and gets people into the habit of reading.

I have a theory that even bad books serve a useful purpose. They’re often easy to read, and that makes them a gateway drug into reading itself. That’s why so many people start with vapid self-help books or the trashy titles stacked in airport bookstores. As idiotic as those books might seem, they introduce people to the act of reading. And for that reason, I think we need as many bad books as we do good ones.

With that, I highly recommend watching the Bloom interview. What I’ve written here is just a loose reflection after watching it. I have more thoughts on the act of reading, but that’s for another post.