We Don't Know How To Read (And How to Learn Again)

Part of remarks originally delivered at The Row House Forum in Lancaster, PA on November 8, 2024

I work for a publisher that aims to champion and preserve the best American writing. I have recently become convinced, though, that a problem confronts us today that goes beyond preservation: that we, as a culture, are forgetting how to read. Why should we care about preserving books if we don’t know how to read them?

Let me explain.

Starting in the Enlightenment and then accelerating in the last century, especially in the last few decades, we’ve changed our ideas about the nature of human nature, and our ideas about what books do have changed as a result. We used to see ourselves as works in progress: we each had a thing that was called a character, or perhaps called a soul, that needed to be formed or built or shaped through the seeking of wisdom. This is an idea of the nature of human beings that goes back to Aristotle, and has been the most common philosophy of the nature of human nature until the past few hundred years: you are who you are becoming. And in this, a primary vehicle for that shaping, that becoming, was through reading good books.

But now we primarily see ourselves as having a self that doesn’t need to be molded but instead just discovered and expressed. You are who you are. We say things like: Born this way. You do you. Be true to who you are. And with this has come individualism: wanting to be seen for who we are, wanting to be affirmed; an emphasis on performance, on productivity, on having a platform. And the irony is, that in thinking of ourselves this way, with an unchanging identity, we begin to think of ourselves as being fragile. If you cannot change, then you can also break. This way of seeing ourselves goes back to Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, and it’s now become the dominant way of seeing human nature.

This has changed the way we read. Instead of reading as a method of becoming a better, wiser human being, we read for what we can get out of it. Books have become something to deliver our needs and wants. A lot of people have decided that books don’t deliver anything useful, and they’ve quit reading altogether. For those of us who still read, we treat books as safe-deposit boxes, or maybe hard drives, for information and ideas that we can extract. Reading becomes about productivity. Like checking off how many books we read. The New York Times recently published¹ their list of the 100 best books of the century so far, and it has checkboxes under each book so you can tally how many you’ve read.

But when we treat books as something that can be mined for information, and when we see ourselves as static beings that cannot grow or change, that leads to two equally dangerous possibilities. The first possibility is that we see books themselves as threats, that need to be carefully selected in order to avoid our being tainted by them—this is what’s led to the rise in book banning around the country—and when we think this, we had better be careful to avoid reading any book that we don’t agree with completely. Doing so becomes dangerous, like you might be contaminated by them. And viewing books as this powerful means, inversely, that we see ourselves as very fragile, that we’re so easily harmed by what we read.

The second possibility is that we see all books as the same, that it doesn’t matter what you choose to read, and treat them with a naïve openness, seeing reading as providing experience, but not one that should be approached with judgment or wisdom or discernment. In this view books are sources of information about the world, not even knowledge, and never going as far as wisdom. Books are something we consume, but that have no power to shape us and definitely not to harm us. Instead of being fragile, we see ourselves as being rock hard, and untouchable.

But there’s a third way that avoids both these extremes. Because we are not as fragile as we might fear. Neither are we untouchable. And for this middle way I think we need to recapture how people used to think about books and reading. Because the truth is that reading does change us. I think every serious reader has had the experience of reading at least one book in their life that they were not the same person when they finished a book that they were when they began it.

Books change us because they shape our desires. Another way to say that is that they shape what we love, what our hearts or souls or characters—whatever word you want to use for it—is directed at. Your heart is like a compass. A compass needs to be calibrated in order to point at true north. If I take my compass that I use for hiking in Bear Mountain State Park and then go to New Zealand to hike there, I actually need to take a little key and recalibrate the compass so that it will still work properly on the other side of the world. So if our hearts are a compass, then books are the keys that calibrate that compass. And that does mean that discernment is required, to make sure your compass is pointed at what is wise and good and true and beautiful. In other words, to reality. Books can help us navigate the wilderness of this world, to find our way to what is real. I think we all feel the need of that in this cultural moment.

The way books shape us is that we become a character in the book while we read. When you are reading The Memory of Old Jack, you are Old Jack. You get to try on his thoughts and his desires and his actions, and his memories become your memories. That’s what changes you. That’s the power of stories. Maybe you are more empathetic to, have more love for, people like that wonderful old man after you read it. But you’re also different yourself. Your self, who you are, expands.

You will not be able to read this way if you read for productivity, or for extracting rules for living, treating a book like a self-help manual or an answer book. You won’t be able to read this way if you’re reading for acquiring facts, or if you’re reading skeptically, looking for things you disagree with. And you won’t be able to read this way if you skim. It requires deep reading.

This is why we need to relearn how to read. So how do we do that?

First, we have to read slowly. According to writer Nicholas Carr² and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf,³ who have been writing about what screens have been doing to our brains longer than anyone else, we no longer read left to right. Instead we scan the whole page in a zigzac pattern looking for key words. So it must be said: read left to right. Sound out every word in your head. Or read aloud!

Second: reading takes risk. We have to be willing to open ourselves to be changed by what we read. And honestly, that can be frightening. To not approach a book with skepticism, not expect to disagree with it, not come to it with preconceived notions about what we might expect to find there, but to read with a spirit of curiosity and discovery.⁴

Third, after you’ve read a book, then you have to think critically about it. Contemplate what you’ve read. After you’ve seen it for what it is, you can start asking whether you agree with it, and whether the author accomplished what they meant to, and whether it’s worth re-reading. But we must start with openness, or we’d be in danger of mistaking just what it is we’re reading.

And at this point we must ask ourselves questions like: where do I see myself in this story? Which character am I inhabiting? Or how can I live this in my life? What would change in my life if I lived this?

Rereading, by the way, is an important part of reading. From rereading sentences and paragraphs to make sure we’ve understood what the author is saying to rereading a whole book to experience it in a deeper way. Checking books off a list doesn’t lend itself to a value of rereading. We need to have a value for reading deeply over reading widely.

Fourth and finally: Practice. For some reason people think that you’re either a good reader or you’re a bad reader. But that’s back to thinking of ourselves as not being able to change, learn, and grow. Being a good reader, like being a good piano player, takes practice. So keep trying. Don’t give up.

With thanks to The Row House Forum in Lancaster, PA, for giving me an opportunity to think more deeply about this topic.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html

2. See The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2nd ed., 2020).

3. Especially in Reader, Come Home (New York: Harper, 2018), but also in her earlier book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

4. My friend Cristina Vischer Bruns opened my eyes to just how necessary this is, and how literature functions as a kind of liminal space. Her book Why Literature: The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching (New York: Continuum, 2011) is excellent.