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

The act of reading makes me feel safe. Not the book itself--but the exercise of running my eyes over the words. The translation from symbol into meaning. The direct, pleasant diction of the voice inside my head. The influx of information. The transport to other lives, other worlds.

Life is so much better with books than without.

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. And that, friends, is why I read.

Here’s the truth: we can read whatever we want, whenever we want.

I also think we underestimate just how weird—unexpected, unusual—a lot of famous books are. A long time spent in the public consciousness can sand down a book’s rough edges.

I think, therefore, I cry...

You have to read a book for some reason, and you're not that excited about it, but you're a good person, you're not going to say you read a book when you didn't. So you run your eyes over every single line. And yet, when you get to the end, much more quickly than you should've, you'd be hard-pressed to explain even the basics of the book. It has a main character, and that main character had a problem. Maybe? Things happened, and then the problem resolved. Probably...we didn't really read the book. We saw very page of the book.

Books are sly and can crack us open.

Read whatever you like, books about railroads or by Real Housewives, romances set in quaint New England towns in the fall, mysteries in which Queen Elizabeth II somehow stops a murder in between the whole being-queen thing. Tom Clancy. Danielle Steele. Whatever. Just keep reading.

You may not know this about me, but deep in my little rule following heart there is a rebel who doesn't like to be told what to do.

Lawson’s cookbooks are wide-ranging—there’s one for celebrations, another for Christmas in particular, one for Italian cooking, and an uncharacteristic volume about diet food—but her best ones are very British. So many meat pies, so many puddings, an intense fondness for passion fruit, rhubarb, and mincemeat.

I have many hills upon which I’m willing to die, but none is so deeply held as this: plays—dramas, comedies, playscripts, what have you—are supposed to be heard. Ideally, plays are to be enacted or performed, but if that’s not possible, they should at least be read aloud. It baffles me that anything less than this is accepted in our schools.

Marie opened Farmer Duck and took a big breath, but just then, Tyler appeared behind her. His index finger pointed upward. In the voice of an Old Testament prophet, he intoned, “It is there! On the shelf!” If he had said it with just a bit less assurance, or if his tiny finger hadn’t been pointing directly at the shelf that did, indeed, hold Old MacDonald Had a Farm, or if Jenny, her voice freed again, hadn’t said, “Oh, wow,” with quite such awe, we might’ve reasoned with him.

Take John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It’s a strange, sad, beautiful book, one that I think about surprisingly often. Being forced to read it in my sophomore year of high school introduced me to and gave me a way to think about American poverty, American striving, and the narrative uses of dialect for good or ill. I cannot say I liked the book—my mom and brother can still recollect my specific and bitter complaints about that dialect—but, on some level, I enjoyed it. It stayed with me.

I applaud comfort reads. We do not need to feel the brisk, salt-air wind of new adventure on our faces every time we pick up a book. Sometimes we do like a new adventure on the high seas, but it's also nice to take a trip to a place you've been to before and admire what's changed. Genre is the comforting solace we come home to in our reading lives.

I feel a familial affection for my fellow longtime, intense readers. We are kin. Quiet, introspective, tea-and-cozy-quilt-loving kin.

We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human.

Gawande is adept at depicting the confusion of aging and dying, particularly in how we’re conditioned to believe that to be ill, to be dying, is somehow a failure (even though, as he relentlessly notes, we all will experience illness and death), which was comforting.

The list of stupid things smart people have said and thought in the general category of Books is endless.

I think we sometimes forget that reading, even reading solely for pleasure, is real work. Perhaps the physical exertion isn’t much, but the demand on our minds is substantial.

in reading, I was never lonely, the way I sometimes felt in real life. Reading did not lead me astray. The words were clear, and if I didn't understand them, t wasn't because I didn't hear them correctly. No one cared if I reread (asked the book to repeat, that is) multiple times. And people mostly left me alone when my nose was buried in a book. Reading was always safe and always good company.

But reading! That I could do. When I read, I felt smart.