I Didn’t Read 4,389 Books This Year. Bite Me.

Read to learn, to write better, not to beat a record.

What is it with this book-reading craze? Every article, here on Medium and elsewhere, seems to give an account of how many books someone reads and the ways they are avoiding their lives to get in a few more pages before lights out. Oh, wait. No lights out. They read in their sleep. How else could they read a humongous number of books in a year?

And to what end? Can they recall from memory the novels, self-help guides, essay collections, poetry chapbooks, biographies, and textbooks the’ve mentally inhaled? What are they doing with the knowledge they gained if they can’t put the book down and savor its wisdom or wit, its lyrical beauty or depthless exploration of the human conundrum? Or, try out all the recipes in the cookbooks on their Kindles. Please tell me they read cookbooks, too.

What good is a self-help book if you don’t let it help yourself because you are too busy reading all the other self-help books pushed out this month?

Don’t get me wrong, I support reading. I love reading myself. I have since my big sister first sat me down and took me through the breathless suspense of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. More, I said when she’d come to the end of the story. I wanted more, ever more.

Some years later, during the summer of third grade, she took me to the Westchester Square Library in the Bronx for my first taste of heaven. She helped me fill out my application for a library card, and I brought home an armful of books. I read in bed the next morning when I woke up early and opened to a word I decided was choss.

I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t mind. I had the summer to read my way around words I didn’t know, though it would take until the beginning of the fourth grade to learn that choss was chaos, and I’d do better with a dictionary by my side if I wanted to read above my pay grade.

But let’s be reasonable. What are you going to do with 350 books a year and no life? From the description of these marathon readers who seem to swallow books whole, they only reach their target number by living in third-world countries and paying for live-in help to wait on their every need so they can read, read, read.

No children to interrupt them, no pets, no chats with neighbors across the back fence or favorite Facebook page? Where’s the fun in that? Reading books shouldn’t be a competition or a race. And what else can this kind of wholesale devouring of books be but a trendy sport to show off reading chops?

It has a whiff of hoarding about it, mindless collecting for the sake of collecting. To say you’ve read more books than that other guy, the guy at the top of the heap.

But you can’t do what he did. He figures things out for himself. He starts the trend; he doesn’t just join in the race. And when I read his method and results, frankly I wasn’t that impressed. It seemed a collection of oddities that left me cold rather than jealous. Nothing articulate or poetic or lyrical. Just a hodge podge of facts.

No problem if that’s your thing. I don’t knock binge reading. I’ve certainly done my share. I devoured Flannery O’Connor when I uncovered her short stories and especially her letters. Alice Munro influenced my writing so much I had to stop reading her collections for a while to get my own voice back, though it will never be as good as hers. Barry Lopez took up hours and days of my time when I pored over Arctic Dreams and his many short stories after that.

One memorable day a friend with AIDS called terrified his crushing headache signaled the end. I rushed over, and we sat in his garden with his head on my lap. I pulled Arctic Dreams out of my purse. It was always close at hand in those days, underlined and ragged from rereading one beautiful sentence after another. I opened randomly and began describingsnow geese lifting toward heaven. My sick friend’s eyes closed, and I could see him flying away, too, away from his pain for a few moments, getting lost in the clouds, floating on the wings of Lopez’s prose.

I wrote to Barry Lopez after he died to tell him the gift his words delivered that day. That’s what reading should be, savoring it and offering it to someone to take them away to a new place.

I don’t want to know many books you’ve read. Tell me whom you’ve read. If you want to write stories of families, have you read Tolstoy or Danielle Steele? Then I’ll know the direction of your stories, the bar you’ve set for yourself. Do you want to figure out your life? Then tell me you’ve read the Shakespeare or Alan Watts or just the stuck with the latest USA best seller by Dr. Phil? Then I’ll know if I can trust your advice to read to learn who I am.

Sure, read many books. Always, but not indiscriminately just to rack up the numbers. Choose books for your age. The books that were memorable for me at thirty were meaningless at sixty. But works that last have told me who I am. They called to me, and I answered. I read The Iliad standing on a bus going to a job I hated after my heart had been shattered at forty. I came to the line where Dido tells Aneas that through her own pain, she learned to comfort other suffering men.

Yes, I said, and that’s who I am. And because I finally recognized myself, I was able to volunteer for an AIDS organization and soothe not just my own broken heart, but many others. I don’t need to read that at 80, or not for that reason. That’s what reading does, that’s why we read. Not for numbers, for knowledge. About ourselves, life, the world.

Warning, here comes the old lady giving out advice. We never know when the end will come. A Disney star just dropped dead at 20. A friend just told me her friend collapsed mowing his lawn at 56. My little brother passed at 5 years old. We think we’ll live forever, but nobody gets out alive.

Do you want to spend a year of your reading books that might not benefit you, just because you can say you did? Reading is an investment of time, energy, and concentration. Make sure you use that time well. Bulk up your brain and your psyche the way you would your muscles in the gym. You wouldn’t fling weights around wildly just to say you could lift. You’d treat your body like the temple it is.

Do the same for your mind. Make books your key to unlock the universe, not just a notch on your Kindle.