why do i read? a response to an article
by John Dufresne on Why I Read*
by celia miles

Readers take to books for a dozen reasons and sub-reasons: to learn, to relive, to live vicariously, to escape our present reality, to aid our fantasies, to postpone, to delay, to even prevent either doing or thinking, work or decision-making. I suppose our personalities determine our major reasons for reading. We certainly must read as students–in school and in life–to learn. But relatively little factual material stays with most of us for very long, for me even less long. It’s the stories we read that infuse us with our beliefs–and our beliefs determine our everyday living actions and reactions.

Like Dufresne, I try to remember my first introduction to the written word. Speaking comes naturally; by that I mean that human beings by virtue of hearing sounds, reproduce sounds, but reading is a different kind of activity, an unnatural one, one that requires us to translate the sounds we hear to inky representations on a page; reading is artificial, reading is civilized, nurture as opposed to nature; interaction rather than mere imitation. Think of what happens when we read: we see marks on something (usually paper but it could be a sand shore, a slate, a black/chalk board); those marks mean nothing until we learn the meaning not only of the unit of marks but the sounds of each squiggle within the separate unit; we must correlate sound with sight with meaning and sometimes the “meaning” means nothing. How can a child, never having had an experience with, say, a plane, comprehend the unit of letters that in turn translates into an object that without a visual, a drawing, is beyond her experience? Moving beyond the physical, the tangible, how can a child or an adult comprehend the meaning of a word like Hindu or sacrifice or catharsis?

I vaguely recall the Jane, Dick and Spot books, little thick books with Western heroes and stories and from early geography books I remember the Euphrates Valley and some of the Seven Wonders of the World and little else. Somewhere around the fourth grade I graduated to Nancy Drew, Trixie Belton, the Hardy boys, and then soon to my mother’s shelf of Doubleday Book Club editions.

When I was a teenager, Daddy hardly interfered in my life but one question he exclaimed remains with me: “Do you believe everything you read in a book?” I must have been stating something contrary to his views. He went no further than the eighth grade, spent his adult life in rough work, hard work: logging, cutting timber for Champion Papers, finally getting on at the Canton mill “in the woodyard” and ultimately moving to an inside job. I seldom saw him read; in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing him routinely pick up a magazine or book, though he did scan the local paper sometimes. In his parents’ house, I saw only two items for reading (other than calendars): the almanac and the bible. At any rate, he must have had a certain distrust of reading, especially since it kept his older daughter “with her nose in a book” too much of the time. He wanted me to grow up as his sisters had, but I wasn’t learning to cook, sew, clean, milk cows, plant gardens...wasn’t doing anything his mother and sisters and aunts had to do and did all their lives. For whatever reason, my mother didn’t encourage us, certainly didn’t push us to cook, sew, clean...and we didn’t have a cow or much space for a garden. You can’t keep a cow in a garage and you can’t plant potatoes on a sidewalk. So I read and so he wondered: do you believe everything you read in a book.

I ponder now: no, I don’t believe everything but I do think that in my formative years my reading influenced my attitudes, perhaps gave me a romantic view of the world, a view that lurks beneath my knowledge and surfaces to wipe the dirty face of reality with a soft cloth. I’m trying to think what I read that makes me think together, learn to compromise, to do the right thing... I wish I could find a copy of that book to see if I still like it. Before the Sun Goes Down was not in any way a child’s book; it was my first sociology course. I now have two or three copies on my shelf. In it I learned of adults interacting with their children, children who were not perfect but behaved well; I learned of poverty, class structure, old family money...it was a study in another social strata for me and in romance, as well: a doctor who loved a married woman did not get her but sacrificed love to honor. It sounds so trite to write it, but the book surely influenced me because it leads to another statement I/we heard so often as we grew up: “You’re old enough to know better.”

Our family were not religious; we kids went to church when someone took us, at Christmas and Easter, went to baptizing, went to prayer meetings (held in homes), and later when we lived in town we went to the Free Will Baptist Church and later, in college, I joined the Methodist Church. So we gleaned very little behavior tenets from the church and very little preaching from our parents. There were no dinner table discussions of right and wrong, no little mother-daughter bedtime chats, no fatherly walks and talks. Our family didn’t talk much. Somehow we children were supposed to just pick up familial, social, community behaviors. How many times did we hear: “You’re old enough to know better” when no one had, in fact, told us–not to pick up a banana at a neighbor’s and slip it into our jacket (esoteric fruit that it was), not to scratch ourselves in private places in public, not to kiss a boy at the church picnic, not to “sass” your elders even when, especially when, they deserve it. When my sister put her arm in the washing machine wringer, after the rescue, we heard “You’re old enough to know better.” And somehow we did learn to know better: by observing and by doing (and suffering the consequences) and surely by reading. And it’s far less dangerous to learn from reading.

My family generally believes I prefer books to reality and I’m trying to think why that may be so if indeed it is. A very good reason is that books are controlled substances–and addictive thus. No matter how caught up I am in the story line, I’m always aware that behind it all is the writer, and the story can be ordered (even if portraying intense disorder), the characters pulled, pushed, and handled skillfully by the puppeteer (again, even as they seem otherwise). Perhaps, seeing the general messiness of life about me, seeing how buffeted by fate, circumstances, weather, higher ups or lower downs, I realized that life doesn’t really proceed like a plot; there’s no ending, even with catastrophic events; there’s no neatness, no divisions into sections, no neat chapter endings that prepare us for the next events. I must have early on realized that a book is a tangible entity from which one can expect and get certainties in the same way that a stove delivers heat, a cup holds water, a window provides light and ventilation. Books, at least books then, ended, were neatly tied up packages, with people learning their lessons, getting their proper comeuppance, suffering for a reason; life didn’t demonstrate the same things at all. I preferred the fiction because it left me more comfortable, with a sense that things could be managed, controlled, fixed.

In Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis says we read not to be lonely. And that’s a very good, if hardly profound, reason to read. We can find any thing we seek in books: solace, comfort, romance, adventure, quirky, lovable, hateable characters–at our fingertips, ready to be devoured, enlisted, befriended, whatever. For minutes or hours we inhabit another universe, live in the psyches of others, suffer, survive, and, underneath it all, have a sense of some control in the world.

Are there negatives to reading? Of course, keeping our head in a book doesn’t get the work done around the house; Jude Deveraux is more inviting than wiping around with Windex. Reading Seven Habits of Effective People requires less effort than producing that project. And reading immoderately, excessively in one vein only may certainly produce effects: unwise expectations of love and marriage, unwise ventures, even, into murder and mayhem. Reading at the expense of talking to your partner may cause rifts, and so it goes. Reading that separates you from family attitudes may start a cut that turns to a chasm. But these so called negatives are negative only in extremes: stories of romance and murder mysteries can deepen our understanding of the human psyche, as can reading Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Alice Munroe.
Dufresne says he doesn’t read for entertainment. Weird. He reads for information. I read for information when I have to, need to, or want to know something specific, like how to get somewhere or how to do something, or how to pass a test sometime. Then I promptly forget these facts. I realize that I get a general view of times and places and human behavior and social conditions from my reading; from the Victorian mysteries of Anne Perry to The Mists of Avalon to the novels of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, I know that if I were plopped down in the settings of those works, I could survive, would understand the mores and codes that governed the times. I have absorbed the essence of living there when I’m in the book, in the same way that I live in my outward life. I do not necessarily read to know how many miles it is from London to St. Ives and don’t remember how many miles from Asheville to London...as many times as I’ve been between the two. It’s the sense, not the facts, I read for. It’s absorbing a feeling, not memorizing a timetable.

Celia Miles, retired from the NC community college system, is the author of four works of fiction, lives and writes in Asheville.

*My Life is an Open Book: Why I Read, by John Dufresne, published in The Sun Sentinel: Sunshine Magazine, Nov. 8, 1998.