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The magic of books and why we read
I have a confession. Growing up, I hated reading.
I have a confession.
Growing up, I hated reading.
I thought books were a waste of time. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find the fun in them. So, I spent my days kicking a ball around, playing video games, and making fun of kids who spent theirs with their faces buried in books.
In my sophomore year in college, I picked up "The Alchemist," and after turning a few pages, I became aware of an itch that only little symbols sitting on a page could scratch.
I became aware of my starving human heart.
Since then, my appetite for truth, beauty, and meaning has only grown, and I've made it my mission to find the most delicious, extravagant, and satisfying scrolls served on the planet.
This craving and pursuit got me wondering ...
Why do we read?
This question is as old as the written word.
Galileo saw reading as a way of having superhuman powers. For Kafka, reading was “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” For James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny. And Neil Gaiman said our future depends on libraries.
Then, there's the intimate relationship between reading and writing.
“Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer,” the magnificent Zadie Smith told the audience at the 15th annual New Yorker Festival, echoing Susan Sontag’s assertion that fruitful writing is born out of fruitful reading, out of a “book-drunken life.”
But the most eloquent and thorough answer I've found came in a letter to children written by Rebecca Solnit, published in A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. In it, Solnit tells her young readers how books are tools for transformation.
Dear Readers,
Nearly every book has the same architecture — cover, spine, pages — but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.
The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books, learning from books a strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human. Books gave me refuge. Or I built refuge out of them, out of these books that were both bricks and magical spells, protective spells I spun around myself. They can be doorways and ships and fortresses for anyone who loves them.
And I grew up to write books, as I’d hoped, so I know that each of them is a gift a writer made for strangers, a gift I’ve given a few times and received so many times, every day since I was six.
To Solnit, books provide not only knowledge, guidance, and adventure but also refuge, opportunities for self-discovery, and an expanded understanding of what it means to be human.
Honestly, I couldn't have said it better myself.
I'm glad the little portal called "The Alchemist" made it into my life and alchemized my hate for literature into an obsession masked as a deep appreciation. And for that, I'm forever grateful.
Godspeed,
Santi