The Importance of Reading Books

A lot of people talk about how important it is to read books but seldom provide compelling reasons. It isn't enough to encourage reading for its own sake—that's just begging the question. It's not even enough to encourage reading certain kinds of books for their own sake—that's just posturing. When anyone tells me to read the Classics, for instance, simply because they're the Classics, I immediately want to know why they're the Classics, who gave them that distinction, what a Classic even is, and why reading one is inherently beneficial.

Others give one-dimensional answers when asked why reading is important. The purpose of reading, they may say, is to gain knowledge, or to "broaden oneself," or to understand, or some other not necessarily bad but far from complete answer. Of these apologists I want to ask, why is knowledge important? won't experience broaden me? can't I understand without books?

The immediate reply to the second question will likely be, "But you can't have as many experiences in real life as you can in books." So reading is simply an existential exercise? We read only to dip our feet in a wider pool of experience than would otherwise be open to us? If that's the case, why not simply watch a bunch of movies? It generally takes less time to watch a film than to read a book, so if we just watch plenty of movies we'll be all right. Oh, the reply comes, reading is so much better than just watching movies. But why?

Such questioning is likely only to produce frustration, however. For many defenders of reading, their arguments are couched solely in terms of preference: these individuals like to read, and so they try to construct paradigms in which reading is preferable to not reading. None of these paradigms are very realistic, however, and usually they're simply another ruse for separating the goats and the sheep. Am I saying that reading, then, is merely a game, unimportant, and worthless?

I am saying no such thing. Reading books (the right ones, anyway; there's plenty of garbage out there) is extremely important, and I'll be the first to defend the practice. But anything worth doing is worth defending properly, and the more important an activity is, the more important it becomes to defend it well and responsibly. Simply saying "read cause it's good" or "read these books cause they're these books" is juvenile and actually a pretty good reason not to read whatever is being presented as worthy literature.

While vicarious experience has a modicum of value (not near as much as is often assumed), and knowledge can be a good thing (a wonderful thing, even; and also, a terrible and horrible thing), these are not in themselves sufficient reasons to read books. The real reason to read is for perspective. It's awfully easy to assume humankind has progressed imeasurably, or philosophical questions are different today than those posed by Socrates and Aristotle, or that Americans know what's going on better than anyone, or that Europeans are inherently more sophisticated than everyone else, or whatever. The only real way to understand these are all lies is to read authors who identify them as such.

Sure, going to Europe will probably clue you in to the fact that rednecks, hipsters, and drug addicts exist everywhere, but then again, you might be so overawed by the exotic unfamiliarity of it all that you come back with a universally positive report. Sitting in your chair at home and reading about another culture from a fairly objective point of view will likely yield much more balanced results, though. And while it's entirely possible that your chosen author will have rose-colored glasses of her own, or will be a curmudgeon with nothing nice to say, that will (to an observant reader) become clear as the book progresses.

Which is the reason to read widely. It's not going to do any good to read for perspective if you only read one or two authors, or only read three books a year, or only read escapist literature, or only read fiction. These habits will simply succeed in foisting narrow perspectives, and will probably end up worse in the long run than if you read nothing at all. Reading for improvement or benefit is pretty much either a commitment or nothing; you can't do it halfway.

Perspective is largely why we read the Bible. It shows us who we are, who God's people are, what the world is like, why it is like that, and (supremely and all-importantly) it shows us who God is. We don't read Scripture simply for the stories (or, as pomos would stress, the story), for knowledge, or for fun. We read God's Word for the perspective no other book can offer, and this is why we ought to read it more often than any other book. At the same time, good books can help flesh out this perspective, or enhance our biblical perspective, and this is why we read those other books, too.