Is Reading a Waste of Time?

In Moonwalking With Einstein, author Joshua Foer poses a slightly disturbing question: given the finiteness of our lives and given the amount of time it takes the average person to read any book of meaningful length, why do we bother spending countless hours staring at sequences of text when we could be experiencing the natural world, socializing with fellow humans, crafting lasting art/goods, or attempting to monetize our time and our talents? 

Foer wryly muses, "Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that’s about it. I don’t even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn’t say whether I liked the book or not."

This is a potentially scary reality check for bookworms, and I for one scrambled to find an explanation, or perhaps more aptly a validation, of why I choose to read.

For starters, I had never considered looking at my bookshelf a "dispiriting experience" before, each of the colored spines a little Grim Reaper in its own way, a testament to days lost. I shuddered.

And then I tested myself. Surely I could remember verbatim a single sentence, any sentence from the previous page of Moonwalking, that I had read not two minutes before.

But I couldn't.

"Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it’s a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it’s fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade."

The terror-inducing thought here is the apparent immediate loss of anything that could be useful to oneself later on. I read for enjoyment, but I also read for knowledge and to admire and glean from authors' styles. Several centuries ago, before the real profusion of book publication and widespread availability, Foer discusses how depth over breadth was valued because it was the only direction one could go. Generations of intellectuals and laypeople alike read, reread, and memorized the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, Socrates. But we don't have the option anymore to force memorization by repetition. We are blessed and cursed with breadth.

But Foer's intent was not to be the bearer of bad news. His conclusion is satisfying and reaffirming, much to the reader's relief. He insists that whether one is consciously aware of it or not, what one reads has a way of working its way into your worldview. One's mindset is a pastiche of judgements based on personal experience, and an avid reader has the benefit of increased exposure to a vast range of opinions, ideas, and data (given an open-minded and diverse selection of literature, ideally). With a broader and/or deeper set of like and disparate opinions, the reader is more informed and better equipped to back up their opinion, whether or not they remember whence the opinion arose or strengthened. So there you have it.

I'd like to take this one step further, though. I don't like the reliance upon subconscious mental adoption as one's only hope that any wowing passage or idea will be internalized. If I love a paragraph or a particularly germane character quote then by God I make sure I underline it and dog-ear the page if the book is mine, or write the page and line numbers on my scrap bookmark if the book belongs to a friend or the library. I then archive these quotes online. I used to email them to myself after completing each book, but this quickly became cumbersome and disorganized. Now, after every completed book, I create a new entry on a separate blog I curate (Epihel, or Every Passage I Have Ever Loved), reproducing each memorable passage and adding a subject tag. I began this project after being persuaded to do so by Moonwalking several years ago and now, with only about 100 entries, it already feels like an customized treasure trove of fascinating wisdom. Perusing it at random is rewarding, and as a bonus I can use the tags feature to dig up forgotten quotes at the right time. For example, I am officiating a wedding in August and found a David Foster Wallace passage I will be incorporating into the ceremony (with the couple's consent) after searching all my entries on love.

Continually adding to Epihel has also turned staring at my bookshelf from a "dispiriting experience" into an almost holy one. This is what Susan Sontag was referring to when she wrote, beautifully, "my library is an archive of longings." 

Finally, just as important as a bolstered worldview and a personal archive of longings is the importance of sharing what one reads with other people. I love sites like Goodreads and Shelfari because they allow me to see what other friends are reading and then the next time I see them have a meaningful interchange of ideas on the spot. Again, a crafting of one's worldview through the transferring of ideas, but in this case with book discussion as the link between the most important sources of personal validation of truth: each other.

Right before his death in the Alaskan wilderness, Chris McCandless of Into the Wild reads the following passage in Doctor Zhivago: "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness." Next to this line he scrawled "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED." Author Jon Krakauer speculates that had Chris not fallen ill after this epiphany he would have immediately hiked out to rejoin society and partake in shared happiness once more.

And so it is with reading.

BOOKS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.