In Defense of Reading Literature — Slowly, Carefully, Deliberately

With research suggesting reading is on the decline, perhaps we need to reexamine the value of this time-honored pastime?

Whenever I stumble across a popular YouTube video on the subject of reading it tends to focus on a specific type of non-fiction: practicable tips for self-improvement, becoming more successful, growing your income, etc. Of course, it’s obvious why these videos are so popular — like everything else, reading has not escaped subsumption into the late capitalist paradigm. At the expense of comprehensive learning, an undue emphasis has been placed upon 'productivity’. Content creators share their secrets on how to read 100 books in a year, and dozens of apps promise to turn you into a word processing machine. This is a far cry from Nietzsche’s view on what “reading well" entails:

“…slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.”

Interestingly, in the passage from which this quote is taken, Nietzsche was criticizing similar societal trends. So this obsession with “getting things done" is nothing new, but it would be remiss to ignore how the digital age has exacerbated the issue. Throughout my life I have read a great deal of the anti-Christian polemicist, and, fittingly, reading slowly and carefully is a prerequisite to getting the most out of his work. But are younger generations — hooked as they are to the digital mainframe — equipped to give such work the attention it demands? As the late cultural theorist Mark Fischer pointed out:

“…some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.”

Many of my friends rarely read books at all, let alone slowly, carefully, deliberately. But any millennial or zoomer knows they are hardly to blame — there are just simply too many other distractions. While the pandemic may have contributed to people reading more, this slight increase is negligible when viewed within the context of a decades-long decline. In 2018 the U.S Bureau of Labour Statistics conducted a survey that revealed some shocking statistics:

“33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives and 42% of college grads never read another book after college. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years and 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.”

Are we honestly surprised? Never before has our access to entertainment been so easy, so passive, so addictive; never has the effort required for reading literature been so difficult to dredge up. New generations are wiring their brains in such a way as to render reading literature a chore they’d rather avoid.

However, as this survey from the Pew Research Center reveals, we cannot simply lay the blame at the internet’s door:

“Adults whose annual household income is less than $30,000 are more likely than those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year to be non-book readers (31% vs. 15%).”

This would suggest that the propensity to read is directly correlated with economic privilege, so we should be wary of criticism that fails to acknowledge such systemic inequity.

In the face of so many obstacles, it feels as if we may be fighting a losing battle, but to this day I remain a staunch advocate of getting your teeth stuck into a text — curling up in an armchair and pouring over a Dickens, Dostoevsky, or DeLillo. Reading such books might not leave you with any immediately noticeable benefits, or step-by-step methods for improving your life (in fact, they might even make you feel worse in the short term), but they often produce changes as subtle as they are profound.

At times certain texts can be difficult, boring, even infuriating, but the more we challenge ourselves, the more we commit to comprehending an abstruse passage, the better placed we are to experience its overarching gestalt. When reading War and Peace I certainly wasn’t riveted the entire time (especially during Tolstoy’s questionable tangents on the philosophy of history), yet after finishing I was able to stand back and appreciate the long and multifaceted journey I’d taken; to see those boring and difficult sections by the illumination of the whole.

While there are anomalies (such as the literary critic Harold Bloom, who famously claimed he could read 400 pages in an hour), most of us mere mortals must endure the steep slopes of comprehension — great books demand that we take our time. Oftentimes, I will read a paragraph, reread it, stop reading and ponder its meaning, knowing that the value of a text does not depend upon the speed with which I finish, but upon the depth of my relationship with it. So subtle is the cumulative effect of reading in this way — slowly, carefully, deliberately — we often fail to notice how much wisdom and knowledge we’ve acquired as a result. All we have is a faint inkling of slowly chipping away at our stone encasement; of sculpting a more refined human being.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an avid reader. However I can’t treat this predilection like a badge of honor — it’s almost as if I were born with the impetus to leaf through crisp, musty pages, and lose myself within their gravid offerings. Unlike many people, I was fortunate enough to grow up surrounded by books: my home was decked with shelves replete with an eclectic selection of reading material, as were my grandparents’ houses. The mere sight of these books sowed the seeds that went on to nourish my fertile imagination. Many children do not have such a privilege and, without proper encouragement, reading becomes a much harder habit to take up later in life. Do we not owe it to those who’ve been deprived of or lost the love for reading, to sing its praises loud and clear?

After all, like our ancestors clustered around the campfire adding flourishes to Beowolf or The Iliad, storytelling is in our blood. What, after all, are the sum of our lives but the stories we construct? Through reading, we don’t merely absorb words on a page but engage in a creative act. In her essay on David Copperfield, Virginia Woolf explains:

“…the fecundity and apparent irreflectiveness have a strange effect. They make creators of us and not merely readers and spectators.”

A novel does not simply tell a story but enables us to create our own, and every narrative we follow adds a further layer to the palimpsest of our lives. By reading slowly, carefully, deliberately, we create worlds; we tread new neural pathways as if we ourselves had experienced the woes and jubilations of our favorite characters; the characters we shape and mold. We move through permeable interiorities in Mrs Dalloway, feel the psychological repercussions of cold-blooded murder in Crime and Punishment, come closer to understanding our spirituality in Siddhartha — the possibilities are truly endless.

Without reading, I would have been deprived of James Baldwin’s insight into being black in 1960s America, Angela Carter’s radical intertextuality, T.S Eliot’s representation of a landscape irremediably altered by war and modernism. All these experiences, though shared by millions, are mine and mine alone; an infinitude of worlds for every imagination. It is my firm belief that we must defend this time-honored pastime, and allow future generations to experience the myriad wonders many take for granted. For, through reading literature — slowly, carefully, deliberately — we edge a little closer to the purpose of our existence, which, in the words of Carl Jung:

“…is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

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