Why we read

The Reader, Irving R. Wiles

Why do we love stories? Writers such as Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd and Jonathan Gottschall have argued recently that our love of stories is hard-wired: those who could string together the story of why it’s best not to play with saber-toothed tigers, and those with the desire to hear such stories, had an evolutionary advantage over those who didn’t. The listeners got the benefit of experience—saber-toothed tigers, given half a chance, will eat you—without having to encounter the sharpness of the teeth themselves, and the storytellers got a smarter tribe.

For most of us, the tigers are in the background—metaphorical, at worst. Still, we share stories today for many of the same reasons our ancestors did – because they tell us about human experience, and they keep us alive. We read, as Flaubert would say, in order to live.  In the books that matter to us, we find human experience, which can feel sometimes ineffable or chaotic, given shape, re-presented. Offered worlds to consider and characters to be, behaviours, events and outcomes to ponder, we discover: What is it like to be a soldier in Vietnam in the 1960s? A poor gentlewoman without family in Victorian England? An African brought to slavery in the American South? We get to observe and to reflect: How do people react to joy, or to adversity? What will people do when they are in love? When they are wronged? Because they want to get ahead? How many ways can family relationships go wrong, or right? What does it mean to be a woman, a child, or a man? To be an outsider, or a person with power?

Claude Monet (The Reader), Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Those of us who read a lot can also enjoy thinking about how the story is told, not just what the story tells us. We find ourselves thinking, while watching a movie, or reading a book, why? Why did the director leave the camera focussed on that manhole cover? Why the steam? Why does the author surround that woman with daisies instead of roses? In love with the possibilities of language, we may be struck by a particularly surprising comparison—and later notice that it fits into a larger pattern of imagery, and wonder again, why? What are we being invited to consider? For this kind of reader, reading offers a double pleasure.

In discussion with friends and in literature classes, we explore both kinds of questions. But when it comes to writing for those literature classes, especially at the post-secondary level, we are often called to put aside the personal, or the now, to channel the voice and perspective of the general reader rather than the particular individual. Keep your focus on the story, we are taught—don't talk about your aunt, your encounter with a drunk, your views on the world, or your friend's friend's boyfriend.

But books—good books—invite us to think about our world—past, present, and future—and the people in it. This blog makes room for that other kind of writing: for responses launched by the books that land in a wider space than that permitted by the strict form of literary analysis, that allow you to connect a question that resonates in the texts we're reading with the world we actually live in.  Consider this question your starting point: How are the thematic concerns or issues in the books you're reading alive in a specific instance in our present world?  Take it from there. Find a newspaper article. Report on something you witnessed. Explore the big questions and share your thinking.

What will Fanny and Boz, Goat and Peggy invite us to think about?

Let's find out.