Reading, then, can entertain us and provide us with escapism. But there is yet another, more important benefit to reading, which the young travel writer and diplomat Rory Stewart explains in a recent essay. While travelling from Turkey to Bangladesh, he says, he came to understand what it would mean to be illiterate. Although he could speak Farsi, Urdu and Nepali, he could not read the scripts of these languages. He had to rely on largely illiterate villagers, who “could not engage… with the languages and voices of the dead. An oral tradition, even relying on bards with astonishing memories, cannot replicate a shelf of books. Only reading can fully resurrect the minds of others.” He repeats this idea in the sentence that closes his essay: “Reading is the love and resurrection of better minds.” Without literacy, access to the repository of the past is denied us, and we are no longer a civilization, but merely a culture. The words of the greatest thinkers and poets are denied us, and our past remains as inscrutable to us as the blind blocks of Stonehenge and their mute and forgotten builders.
Rory Stewart is one of 43 contributors to Antonia Fraser’s revised edition of her The Pleasure of Reading, each one of whom lists the books that have inspired him or her. There are several other such efforts of similar high quality, among them Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read, her enthusiastic personal paean to the works that have shaped her identity, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and its companion, A Reader on Reading, Robert Alter’s The Pleasures of Reading, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Mark Edmundson’s enjoyably combative polemic Why Read? and David Denby’s Great Books (a vote of confidence in Columbia University’s ‘Great Books’ undergraduate humanities program) and the same author’s recent highly-praised study of high-school reading, Lit Up. All are worth reading. Good guides to books for children are John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children and Michelle Landsberg’s Guide to Children’s Literature.
George Stoyonovich, the self-deceiving high-school dropout who is the central character of Bernard Malamud’s short story A Summer’s Reading makes a rash public promise to read a hundred books over a jobless summer, and fails to read a single one. Eventually, he can fool neither himself nor his neighbours any longer, and he flees in shame to the local library where, we are told in the final sentence, he “sat down at a table to read.” Perhaps, if he practiced those unfashionable virtues of self-discipline and persistence long enough, he would manage to read himself right out of the East Side ghetto he so longed to escape. At the very least, his stay there would be made more bearable, perhaps even pleasurable, if he were able to develop an appetite for reading, and a hunger for the wisdom contained on the printed page. We must all, likewise, continue to develop and attempt to satisfy that same appetite. The health of our society depends on it. We might even come to like cheese…
