RESEARCH SKILLS
Why read books
- Incorporate deep reading into your daily life
- Expand your horizon by reading books
HOW TO
Claiming to read books is on the way to becoming an admission of idleness. Who can make time,
with relentless pressure at work combined with a busy personal life? Why bother
in the first place, when we can access information instantaneously, and already
sift through ample written content in the form of reports, articles, posts, and
text messages? The couple of hours we could devote daily to serious reading, we
might as well use to get a life. If it’s a matter of entertainment, relaxation,
or even general culture, there are fun museums, great websites, excellent
documentaries and a host of leisure activities that will do the trick. Put
simply, books are generally hard to write, hard to read, and hard to sell—so
what the heck?
The
all-encompassing answer is that hard is beautiful. A great book is an author’s
lifetime accomplishment, a long but nonetheless distilled and purified version
of his or her experience, intellectual depth and creativity. Conferences,
interviews, summaries and other derivative products are but a shadow of the
full-fledged work. Indeed, publishing forces an author to give his or her
thinking the best possible shape and texture—a demanding exercise that brings
out the best in them, too. Naturally, not all books are great, calling for ruthless
selection. Shunning the better kind, however, amounts to depriving oneself of
some the most enriching moments we can hope for in our own lifetimes.
The all-encompassing answer is that hard is beautiful
Books are
particularly tough because they demand much of the reader, also. They require
patience and consistency, which themselves entail considerable determination
and discipline in a world of agitation and stimuli. Pushing back on the
de-structuring effects of digital media, audio soundbites and catchy visuals
certainly is an argument in itself in favor of long reads: just as our heart
strengthens with endurance more than sprints, our brain needs that kind of
workout to perform at full capacity. But the most important effort exacted from
readers is not sitting still and focusing for once: it’s about diving into a
whole universe that opens in front of them.
Films are largely
self-contained and self-explanatory, even if we are sometimes left to ponder a
riddle the plot never solved. Articles make a point, or tell a story that
induces fleeting identification. Books, whether fiction or analytic, create a
space we are invited to explore. As we progress, we toy with the many facets of
a character, a context or an argument, in all their lively complexity. We pause
long enough to build real rapport with the content of the author’s vision or
worldview. Because much in a book happens to be written between the lines,
reading triggers our imagination: we fill the gaps, picture the people and
situations outlined, connect novel ideas to thoughts of our own, and often
drift off in a daydream. This process is what makes long reads such a uniquely
creative moment, a source of profound inspiration.
In a sense a book,
in how it reverberates inside us, gives us a rare opportunity to explore
ourselves at greater depth. Engaging with less exacting cultural products will
produce emotions and reflections that stay much closer to the surface. This may
help explain the fact that, although movies, plays, paintings and photographs
have prompted colossal popular infatuation, only books have ever spurred or
shaped social and political movements. Significantly, many a great
cinematographic success, or blockbuster TV series, is based on a publication.
The ability of books to capture and unleash collective desires and imaginaries
seems, to this day, unequalled.
The ability of books to capture collective desires is unequalled
Reading them,
therefore, goes far beyond tapping into our collective wisdom to learn from
others, be it knowledgeable authors or the characters they feature, whose
travails teach us something we can relate to. It plugs us into, so to speak,
the source code of the culture we belong to, whose oral and visual
manifestations are infused with elaborate texts. Doing so equips us with extraordinary
tools to understand patterns of human behavior that have long been questioned
by our forebears, and spares us the embarrassment of mistaking derivative work
for genuine breakthroughs. We take the trouble of reading books to save us the
trouble of reinventing the wheel.
The motivation to
read, however, cannot flow solely from some generic, principled aspiration to
do so. To be sustainable, reading must bring vindication and tangible rewards
throughout the process. This, in turn, demands that we read with expectations
and a purpose. Ask for advice, peruse reviews, stroll through libraries and see
what fits your needs: satisfying nagging curiosity about a topic, discovering a
part of the world, mastering the works of a given author, gaining a professional
edge, and so on. There is a strategy to reading that entails setting palpable
goals.
A final reason to
delve into a book is quite simply that reading is a habit that grows on you,
slowly turning into a compulsion. Great books will speak for themselves,
pulling up their own arguments tailored to you. Getting started may be a drag.
But each fulfilling experience will lower the initial barriers to sitting still
and letting go.
2 August 2017
Illustration credit: The flying carpet by Viktor Vasnetsov on Wikipedia / public domain.
