These days, everyone wants you to read.
Teachers, career counselors, parents, even movie stars on library posters, they all have the same mantra.
Read.
Reading is fun/cool/power/key to success/scrumptious. Reading will boost your IQ. Reading will cure pattern baldness. Yes, it looks like sitting somewhere by yourself, squinting at words put together by some stranger who might even be dead, but it’s really a blast. No, really. Turn that TV off. Go read something.
It’s a tough time to be a non-reader.
Myself, I happen to relish books. Actually, since you’re reading this, I guess you might like books too. But if you don’t, I understand.
Books are lonely.
You can’t talk with a book, or hug it, or joke around, or even give it a little smooch. That’s why I wish that the Read To Succeed gang would mention the best part of books: talking about what you’ve read with real, live, other people.
That’s right, talking about books.
Face it. What do you usually talk about? Let’s tentatively group the topics:
- Girls (or Boys, if you yourself are a girl)
- Other Guys (or Other Girls)
- Parents, And The Mystery Of How They Keep Their Jobs While Manifesting The Intellectual Stamina Of A Half-Eaten Bowl Of Pasta
- The Meaning of Life
- The Non-Meaning of School
- Everything Else
(That last category keeps this from getting stereotypical.)
You’ll notice that “Books” weren’t high on our list. They’re deep in “Everything Else”, somewhere between “Sports” and “Toe Cheese”. Why talk about books when you could be talking about Other Guys, The Meaning of Life, or Why She’s Still Pretending You Don’t Exist?
Well, if talking about books meant discussing book bindings and paper thickness, I’d agree with you. Books, as objects, are less intriguing than the average right foot. But some books, the great ones, happen to be chock full of something quite fascinating: ideas.
Why do you talk, anyway? Lots of reasons, but a big one is that your friends, teachers, parents, plumbers, or whoever, are different from you.
If you’ve got a problem, your friend might have a solution you’d never dream. If you think you’ve finally figured out the mystery of love, your philosophical plumber may have the perfect witty comment to topple your house of cards. Without other people, we’d be abandoned in our own tiny heads.
Why read? Because authors are some of these other people. When you read, you listen to someone new talk for awhile, someone who’s outside your fun but small circle. That’s all reading really is. You’re doing it now. Hi.
Authors also have one advantage: they get paid to polish their thoughts. They have to be clear, concise, and interesting, or they don’t get published. They cut every “you know,” “like,” “sort of,” and “man!” At least, that’s like what’s supposed to sort of happen, you know.
Not all authors do this. The sad truth is that many authors have fewer ideas than a dead buffalo. Avoid them.
Hey, get back here!
What I mean is, forget the dumb books. The good books, the great books, the classics, those are worth talking about. When a book’s still being read after a hundred, three hundred, three thousand years, there’s got to be a good reason.
Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare–what do those names mean to you? Dull, dusty volumes of philosophy in the cobwebby shadows of the reference section? Blow off the dust sometime, and you’ll laugh at how wrong you were.
Myself, I hardly touched those books in high school. I read good books, but usually not “classics”. Plus, boring English lectures and deathly discussions of details ruined several excellent classics, especially Shakespeare. When I occasionally wandered into an older book, I quickly got confused by the weird style.
Then came college and an Honors Class. It was supposed to be this elite class, but you know what we did?
We read books. Then we talked about them. We started at the dawn of Western Literature with Homer’s Iliad and worked our way right up to T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis.
I loved it. It was the best of two worlds, reading and talking. Reading is great, but it’s only listening. Talking is great, but it often runs low on ideas. Now, I had great books and great conversation.
First, the books. Wouldn’t you know it, the classics really were great. They made many modern novels look pale, drab, lifeless. Classical authors wrestled. They fought with the huge, obvious, incomprehensible things–love, death, God–things that are still mysteries after thousands of years.
I’d already done this myself in my small way, but how far can one guy get alone? If I’d never read or talked to anyone who was really wise, I’d have blundered around arguing about The Meaning Of Life with my equally clueless friends until we just got tired of trying.
Instead, through great books, I found out that a vast army has been hacking away at confusion for centuries, hunting for truth. Oddly, they’ve left their discoveries in boring-looking books with hideous covers.
Second, the conversation. In high school, my book world was private. Now, in this Honors class, this world exploded into living, breathing, conversation. The army wasn’t just dead authors, it was here, it was these strangers, it was in a classroom. The battle still raged, and I could be part of it.
The people were just as surprising as the books. Some of my classmates gave a first impression of having auctioned off significant chunks of their brains to cover tuition. Yet the same guy that could have sat across the cafeteria table and burped his way through all 2,805 meals of our college education could, if provoked by Thomas More’s Utopia, say something fascinating. (Yes, I made that number up.)
Nobody, nobody in my classes turned out to be genuinely boring. I no longer believe in the myth of boring people. Nor do I believe that I thoroughly know my friends. How much do I really know? Everyone has a unique opinion on God, true love, life after death. Everyone’s different. Pry anyone open and inside is gold.
Kind of like those dusty old classics.
So what about you? Probably you already like to talk, maybe you already like to read. Ever try to talk about real stuff with your friends, but have trouble getting your thoughts clear? Ever read something marvelous, but keep it to yourself?
Maybe it’s time for a new hobby.
Nothing formal. You could ask a few friends to read your favorite book, then get together for pizza. Cheap, quick, simple.
Risky?
Sure. You might think you’ve got a good grasp on how the universe works. You might even think you know your friends.
Just wait.
