Reading to Smile, Reading to Learn

I get on kicks where I read a lot. I’m in one right now. Five from the library (great resource, and free) and two pulled from my own shelf:

Foster, Claire Keegan

Hard Rain Falling, Don Carpenter

Ours, Phillip B. Williams

We Are A Haunting, Tyriek White

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk

The Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz

Then, naturally, Aeon drops a 3,800-word essay in my feed asking Does reading do us any good? Aeon is another site for reading, but digitally. Essays on philosophy, science, psychology, and society. I’m a paid subscriber.

The piece, by Flora Champy, walks Proust against Ruskin. Ruskin’s pitch was that books are a wise investment, a training in moral seriousness, an antidote to a society that thinks everything should pay for itself. Proust pushed back. Reading, he said, isn’t a shortcut to great minds. It’s something quieter. A kind of communion you can only have alone with a book. The point isn’t to absorb wisdom from above. The point is that the words let you become more yourself.

Champy lands on Proust. So do I. Mostly.

She spends the long middle of the essay knocking down the modern moralizers. The conservatives who want pre-1940 books to inoculate kids against bad impulses. The progressives who want the canon audited for representativity. She’s right that both camps reduce books to processed food for thought, telling you what to glean before you’ve even sat down with the thing.

But I think the answer is simpler than 3,800 words.

I read to smile. I read to learn. That’s the whole project.

Foster is a slim Irish novel about a girl sent to spend a summer with relatives. I’ve read maybe forty pages. It made me smile yesterday. The Body Keeps the Score is the opposite kind of book, clinical and slow, and I’m learning. Things Fall Apart I should have read twenty years ago. Hard Rain Falling came up somewhere I trust and I wanted to see for myself. Ours and We Are A Haunting were staff picks I followed in on. The Mastery of Love is an old paperback I keep returning to when I need the reminder.

None of these are doing moral work for me. They’re not improving me on a schedule. They’re keeping me curious, which feels like the only honest version of what reading does anyway. Champy closes with a line of Proust’s about books partly lifting “the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe.” I’d put it less elegantly. They keep me looking.

Five from the library. Two from the shelf. A free building down the street that hands you novels by writers you’ve never heard of. If reading does any good, that’s where it starts. Smile, learn, return the books on time.

From Here,