WHY READ?

The problem with a love of reading is that it can disconnect you from the real world around you, making you think thoughts and imagine images that don't have any relation to what's right there in front of your face. You read a book about Taiwan, and suddenly your brain is immersed in facts and figures that are interesting, compelling, potentially moving, but the cars that pass by your house, the birds that chirp overhead, the clouds that do their cloud-like things, remain unnoticed. The reality you inhabit becomes an appendage to the more vibrant world that your intellectual pursuits provide.

So what do we read for then? To connect to something bigger than us. To gain insights into who we are and why we do the things that we do. To know that we are not alone.

But we know that already, don't we? We can walk outside, turn right, knock on our neighbour's door, and our loneliness becomes an illusion. There's a person there, asking who we are and what we want. The deeper insights that books allow, the knowledge that we gain, pales in comparison to the flesh that we now face, flesh attached to a face, and a chest, and a torso, flesh that forces us to confront another living creature, and share our loneliness, our confusions and questions.

Books are an escape. Books are a journey. Books are the means by which we makes sense of a senseless world. These are the reasons that readers give for living and loving books. They're the reasons that I give, too.

But is it all bull? If you want an escape, step out your door. Go on a journey to a new place, a new street, a new shopping mall. If you want to make sense of a senseless world, ask your local priest, rabbi or grocery-store clerk. Those are real people, stuck in the same world you are, dealing with the same daily aggravations that drive us all slowly, unavoidably insane.

I think our love for books is simpler than that, and it comes down to words. Words, words, words. We like words. We like what words do. We like the way they interact with themselves and our own psyche.

Everything else -- escape, knowledge, entertainment -- is a byproduct of what those words do to our nervous systems. We read because are bodies are wired to get off on the electric, kinetic effect that good words grouped together can create. We like the sounds that are formed in our head as our eyes scan the page. We like the buzz and the pulse. All the other good stuff is a not-so-accidental offshoot of the language; the letters are our entrypoint into those other worlds and our lifecraft when we're lost. They give us what the real world withholds -- all of the emotion, all of the knowledge, encapsulated in twenty-six member states, with none of the attachment that life demands.


If you don't get off on the language, you don't get off on reading. And if you do, it's good to remember that life, too, has its own occasional rewards, as transitory as they sometimes seem.