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In Defense of Pleasure Reading

Reading at Risk

It's the middle of the semester. You're surrounded by heaps of required reading, and, yes, you've fallen a bit behind. You can't imagine you'll have time to read all those books and articles — and you certainly don't think you'll be doing any pleasure reading. (A true aside: My father was so horrified by how many books I had to buy my first semester of college, and how much those books cost, that he wrote a letter of complaint to the university president, who then called me in for a meeting. Can you top that for "Weird Things That Happen the First Month of School"? I doubt it.)

I understand. I've been there. In fact, I'm taking three classes at a seminary right now, and I'm wondering how I'll ever have time to do all the reading, and whether I'll ever be able to read for pleasure again.

To be sure, if you think you'll never have time for pleasure reading — or, heck, if you think all of this school reading is going to turn books into something you can never again associate with pleasure — you're not alone. A 2004 study, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that fewer and fewer Americans are reading literature.¹ (To wit, the title of the NEA's final report: "Reading at Risk" — scary!)

It doesn't matter whether you're black, white or purple, male or female, wealthy or working-class — we're all reading less and less with each passing year (though women read more than men). This is not just bad news for folks in the publishing industry. It's bad news for all of us, because, as the study also showed, readers tend to be more civically involved, volunteer more, even play more sports.

Remembering Pleasure Reading

The decline of reading, though, is seen most dramatically among those of us under 30. The Washington Post picked up on this last May, profiling Sherre Sachar, an 18-year-old who had grown up in a family of readers and writers, and who was about to start college at Cornell. Though she grew up in a very bookish family (her father wrote the Newberry-winning Holes), Sherre was supersaturated with books, having overdosed on reading in her high school AP classes.

"I haven't read a book for pleasure in about three years," Sherre told the Post. "If I do, it's in the summer, and I might only get through one book because I'm so sick of trying to read. It's not fun anymore."²

AP classes might be partially to blame, but I think cell phones are another culprit. Look around next time you cross campus. See those students relaxing under a tree or sitting on the steps of the dorm? Are they reading? Nope — they're yakking on their cell phones. A friend of mine, a journalist in New York, notes that folks used to read while they sat on commuter trains. Now, they cell-chat.

I say, close up your clamshell for an hour, even skip a little of your required reading if you have to, and pick up a novel that you've been wanting to read — not because anyone is going to grade you on your recall or analysis, but just because it beckons to you.

(If your professors complain, send them to me. I'll quote what University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt recently told the student newspaper, when asked about students skipping assignments to read for pleasure: "I think the goal of a great University like ours is to produce students who can think for themselves about whatever issue comes their way." If reading pop best-sellers "helps accomplish that goal," said Levitt, "I'm all for it.")³

The Virtues of Reading Stories

I am a big bookworm, but that doesn't mean I'm always reading high-brow literary heavies. In fact, most of the time I'm reading decidedly middle-brow mystery novels. Whether Great Literature or entertaining fluff, I love novels' ability to transport me from my own life to another place, another time. According to librarians, readers are most likely to hit that state that theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow" — "being completely involved with an activity for its own sake" and the wondrous, absorbing thrill that comes with that kind of complete involvement — when we're reading for pleasure.

Novels are not just fun and escapist. They are also tools for shaping our moral selves. They have, in the words of ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, "the power to elicit our sympathy and thus change our attitudes." Novels remind us that life is structured like story and not like a math equation, a theory, or a textbook.

It's no coincidence that much of Scripture, though of course not fictional, is told in narrative, in story form. And Scripture, of course, is not a rule-book or a recipe-book: it is the story of God's relationship with His people, and we are invited not just to read that story, but to participate in it.

Once, I heard a pastor say that he didn't "have time" for fiction — "If I'm going to spend time reading I want to read something true," he said. But fiction is sometimes the truest thing around.

Didn't Toni Morrison get at some essential truths about slavery in Beloved, even though she wasn't sticking to footnoteable facts? Don't Flannery O'Connor's short stories proclaim the Gospel just as loudly as a tract? Indeed, O'Connor's fiction is full of exaggerations, even caricatures, but the exaggerations get at truth in a way even the liveliest journalism never could. As O'Connor famously said, if you are trying to communicate with the deaf, you have to shout, and if you are trying to communicate with the blind, you must draw very large pictures — her fiction is so bold and even outrageous because she knew she was writing for an audience well on its way to moral and spiritual blindness and deafness.

Fiction's Formation

Lately, my pleasure reading consists almost entirely of decidedly-not-highbrow mysteries. I love them. I love the suspense, and the thrill of the chase, and the puzzles. I love getting to know the characters over the course of an eight- or ten-novel series. I love the local color. But I also appreciate the basic moral lesson of mysteries — for mysteries, by definition, must acknowledge the existence and consequences of evil, and they also usually end with good taking the day.

Sometimes what begins as escapist pleasure reading turns out to be morally formative. Actually, my tendency to escape into novels led in part to my conversion to Christianity.

In a bookstore, I stumbled over At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, the first two installments of Jan Karon's popular novels about an Episcopal priest and his eccentric, lovable parishioners in small-town western North Carolina. The novels' world couldn't have been more different from my hectic life in Manhattan — and I found, after reading them about ten times (I am not exaggerating), that it wasn't enough just to enter their world, their faith, vicariously. I found I wanted what those fictional characters had, I wanted it in my own life — something I never would have known had I not had this habit of escaping into fiction.

Of course, there's another, simpler reason for pleasure reading ... it's pleasurable!

And on that note, I am going back to my book ...