About the true pleasure of reading and how modern behaviors are destroying it

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” Virginia Woolf

Woman Reading on a Settee by William Worchester Churchill, detail.

We, as readers, bibliophiles, book lovers, are always thinking about books, about what it means to read, not just as the simple act, but as a deeply, emotional, complicated revolutionary act that opens a thousand doors and worlds to us with each page. At least for me, it is something for every day, something I think about each morning with my coffee, while reading my current book, blogs and literary news. But lately, I have been thinking too about another side of this, the sad side of this world of readers and book lovers especially connected with social media and how we are now relating with books. I was wondering whether or not to write this post but, I must confess, I feel I need to talk about this and know your opinion. Although I'm by no means an old person, I'm indeed an old soul, and most of the time I feel out of place when reading and listening younger people and the way they are relating to reading.

I ask myself, why do I read and the answer is always the same: because I love to learn, and because I must do it, precisely because I have the freedom to do it (I am a faithful believer that if you can read and study, it is your obligation to do so, especially when there are thousands of people who cannot). But I see some people going into a total state of crisis trying to fight themselves with literary challenges, completing a number of books that they should read, reading books that they may not even like just because they have hype, and especially, constantly entering and leaving reading slumps. And I wonder, are these humans even enjoying the act of reading? smelling the book? Do they ever feel they can do a slow and deep reading?

Interior with a woman reading is a painting by Carl Vilhelm Holsoe, detail.

And I’m not talking about speed, because I myself am a fast reader depending on the books, but I mean the quality of reading, really reading something and savoring it, studying it, being able to know a book by heart. I can with total honesty say I have never had one of those reading slumps. What a lier you could say, but the truth is, this concept is really a nonsense. We read because we need it, we want to, we find peace and joy in it. And if you feel sad, or sick, or too tired to read… well, you just don’t need to do it! What is the need of putting so much pressure on you, forcing yourself to read and then feeling you are in a slump because you can’t focus on it. Take some black coffee and listen to some good jazz, stop forcing your mind and stop this act of toxic relation with books, please.

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." – Jean Rhys

Mid-year and December are the key pressure points for this type of readers, knowing how many books they have read and how many they missed, filling those numbers with short reads, maybe bad, maybe that don't even interest them, just to complete the quota. A few days ago I saw an update from someone I follow on Goodreads, this person was desperate because she hadn't read all the books she thought about in the last month. The pressure they put on you, and on others who feel guilty if they read less, is absurd. The pleasure of reading is far beyond numbers, it is about the ritual of it, the act of learning, of becoming part of the voice and mind of hundreds of persons in each book, knowing the soul of the writer, finding your own soul in it.

This quote from Baldwin will always be the perfect way of explaining this:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Woman Reading a Book by a Window Gabriel Metsu, detail.

At the end, while finishing my coffee, I feel sad about these (specially young) readers who have lost the pleasure of reading in these non sense behaviors when in my opinion the only goal when reading should be to search always for quality. What is the point of reading 100 books in a year if half of them are just a bunch of books you chose because of the hype, half bad, and that did not contribute anything to your growth as a human being or intellectually.

I want readers to enjoy the book, to immerse themselves in the story, to do thoughtful annotations, to write diaries where they indeed talk about how this book makes them feel, how they cried or laughed with the book, how they changed after it. But to be able to do this, you all need to stop thinking about reading as a challenge, as something you must do even when you do not feel like doing. We need to think about books again as something primordial, as something that transforms us, makes us better, something that requires time and sincere dedication, to think again about certain books as key pieces for our life, to think that the classics are books that deserve respect and study and not to be read as challenges. Reading should be above all an act of maturity and conscientiousness.

Let's read again for the love of knowledge, let's read with passion, wanting to know more and merge, for an instant, with those words and stories that have changed the world, and will continue to do so.

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like pressed flower... both strange and familiar."

Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

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