The perks of reading deeply

We live in an age of reading.

The Internet, bastion of democratic space that it is, manages to make reading an almost effortless act of consumption. And while parents may forgivably assume that computers and the Internet reduce their children to sun-allergic, outdoors-shying hermits with no love for the written word, the fact is, social media has vastly changed the landscape of literacy.

Twitter teaches one the economy of words and the value of concise and proper phrasing; Facebook has the gaze of a real-time audience to instill in its users a conscious effort to, at the very least, be grammatical in their status updates. Then there’s the proliferation of personal blogs, online magazines, e-books, online journals, encyclopedias, file sharing sites… the list goes on.

Just like that, surfing the Internet is already an act of reading.

Which is not to say, however, that print publishing has been left to languish on its own. Popular literature, for instance, has capitalized on the power of the film industry, where all that is solid melts into cinema. In short: tell me what book is being made into film, and I’ll tell you what’s at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. The movie industry, instead of dissuading people from reading the original text, actually encourages consumers to go out and buy the book. Two factors come into play: first, the populist notion of not wanting to be left in the dark; and second, a thorough enjoyment of the movie which, in turn, warrants a reading of the work itself.

Stranger than fiction

How many picked up The Hunger Games when news broke out that it was headed for the big screen? How many started reading Twilight after witnessing Edward, Bella, and Jacob’s implausible love triangle? How many plan to get themselves a copy of Beautiful Creatures now that the movie’s almost out? And how many plan to devour Fifty Shades of Grey while confirmation of the final cast remains anyone’s guess?

Indeed, the movie industry plays a major role in the consumption of a particular work — both popular and canonical — and this, at least in the interest of wider reading and literacy, is not at all a bad thing. But in the case of popular literature, books from this category are the ones that generally attract a constant readership, leaving the more ambitious works tucked away in the folds of a bookshop, noticed only by literature professors, coerced college students, and the random, if not lost, bookworm.

The evolution of reading as an internet-mediated, cinema-influenced activity seems so apt to us now, so naturally suited to the market ideology of today, that the art of ambitious reading comes off as anachronistic, with no place in the lives of our contemporary readership. Reading is now a social pastime, and if no one understands your reference to Raskolnikov and neurotic obsession in a tweet, then it’s your own problem.

Selfish not social

But the point of reading has always been to strengthen the self, to partake in the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. And the pleasures of reading have always been selfish, not social.  Selfish, but not self-centered. For even if you can’t directly uplift anyone’s life by reading ambitiously, or offer the pleasures derived from solitary reading to the public good, there’s always the deeper hope that, in reading, a concern for others may be developed. Empathy, after all, is stimulated by the growth of a worldly imagination, and by the translation of this imagination into action. Of course, you may find this worldly imagination in books such as Twilight; but then, when it boils down to it, you really can’t. As Harold Bloom says, we read frequently, if unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

The challenge for all of us, then, is to read ambitiously, to read deeply. As an activity of the mind, we owe it to ourselves to swallow books that impart not just knowledge, but also wisdom. After all, self-improvement, and the pursuit of difficult pleasure that comes with it, should be a main consideration of any ambitious reader.

And that’s “reader,” with a capital R.