The Reading Habit
Anonymous
There can now be no excuse for anybody to remain ignorant of the highest forms of human knowledge,
art, and science. Learning is cheap. Books are cheap. Public libraries are huge storehouses of neglected
riches. And all who know books know that they offer joys and riches unsurpassed. Yet, millions let slip the
chance to read, or they read only trash. Things meant to drug in mind rather than delight it and stimulate it.
In hours of unbearable sorrow, books are a refuge. In hours of loneliness, they provide a multitude of
friends, boon companions. You can ignore them completely, unlike your other friends, when they tire you.
The poorest man or woman may travel abroad or live in a castle all his or her own, in a book. A book is a
flying divan, a magic carpet, a house of ever changing furniture, a party, a new viewpoint, and a lot of other
things. Why let a cat have nine lives and live only one yourself? Books can offer you as many lives as you
want to experience. People should read newspapers, for they are the histories of their own time. The person
who neglects them is walling himself/herself in and starving his/her soul. But you cannot understand the
paper of today if you have not read the one of yesterday. Hence, only the reader of books realizes the vast
and ancient brotherhood of man, the oneness of the human family, the repetition of the same errors and
crimes, good deeds, and noble thoughts.
All the wisdom of the ages, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, are easily and cheaply
available to you within the covers of the books-but you must know how to make use of these treasures and
how to make the most from these. The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never
discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.
Reading is the pleasure of mind, which means that it is a little like a sport; your eagerness and knowledge
and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but
because it make your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author’s or eve goes beyond
his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas
develop as you understand his.
The person who reads no books lives on a dessert island. He may think he dwells in a cultural metropolis,
but he is a hopeless villager, narrowing his own life out of sheer laziness and neglect. The person who reads
no books, or a few, robs himself of unlimited wealth to be had for the taking.
What sorts of books is best to read? The answer is every sort. The important thing is not to lose touch
with life, not to narrow your outlook. Some people look down in fiction and think if trifling. They talk as
if facts were the only important things in life and put history, biography, and science higher. But history
and biography both contain fiction. In fact someone has said that history is fiction on which there is an
agreement.
One man calls the subject of his biographies a saints, another calls him a villain, a third says that all the
stories told about him are false and writes new ones. This can go until you are left in a compete doubt as to
what a famous man really was and did. Yet, you should read history and biography in order to learn at least
what people are believing. If rea with an open and inquiring mind, history and biography will be found to
be as fascinating and exciting as any other form of literature.
But there is no need to neglect novels for histories. Just as there is a certain amount of fiction in the fact
books, so there is a vast amount of truth in good fiction. A novelist who take his arts seriously is a good
spokesperson for human sympathy and human understanding. He may write a light or grimly realistic vein.
Above all, do not become a literary snob. Do not let the highbrows push you into thinking that to be
solemn is more artistic than to be merry.
-Read and Understand
N.Y.: The Macmillian Company, 1968