Why I read

Hello, and welcome to another of my ‘Bookish Posts’! Just a disclaimer before I get started – I sat an online 4-hour exam this morning, and my brain is currently a big pile of mush… So I am going to try to keep this blog post as coherent as possible. But if anything in this post makes little or no sense… I blame exams.

With my disclaimer (excuse) out of the way, let’s get started! As you can see (well, hopefully you will have read the title), this is about why I read. Well, it is really more about what I get out of reading. If it were simply about why I read, this blog post would be as short and simple as “because I enjoy it”. Thankfully, this will not be a single-sentence blog post (a blog sentence?), but instead I will be going deeper into why I read, and exploring exactly why I enjoy reading, and what I get out of it.

1. Entertainment & relaxation

I thought I would start with the easiest, and probably most obvious one first. This is often the main reason that we read books, watch films, and play games. They provide a source of entertainment. Whether that entertainment is in the form of humour that makes us laugh, or adventure that excites us, or even romance that tugs at our heartstrings (though, my use of a cliche will probably have just the opposite effect for any writers reading this…), it gives us something to enjoy, which is particularly important when coming home after a busy day at work.

I have also included relaxation in this point because, while relaxation, on the face of it, seems like a point of its own, I think the two are actually quite closely linked. Afterall, relaxation doesn’t always have to be in the form of lying down on a bed listening to waves crashing on the beach (another cliche – sorry writers!), and I would consider reading books, watching films, and playing games all to be their own form of relaxation (unless you get angry playing games, in which case it is probably not that relaxing…). I find books particularly relaxing, as you have to focus enough attention on the book which allows you to be transported to a whole other world, which is weirdly therapeutic.

2. They connect us to others

It can sometimes be difficult to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes (cliches all round!), particularly if we do not fully know or understand their circumstances. Books, however, provide a gateway towards stepping into another person’s shoes. When you read the story, you tend to see yourself as the main character (or the person from whose point of view the story is being told), or at least as someone who is very close to this person. You feel their emotions, think their thoughts, feel their pain. In short, books develop our empathy.

While the above is most relevant for fiction books, it can also be true for non-fiction books. The added advantage of non-fiction books is that they can fill in a gap in our knowledge and understanding, which can often be a barrier in the way of empathy. Afterall, it can be difficult to empathise with someone if we don’t even know what we are meant to be empathising with them about.

3. Learning

The opportunities for learning are endless, no matter how much we learn, there is always something else we can choose to learn. Whether this is as part of a new skill we want to learn and develop, or a topic we want to learn more about and gain an understanding of, there will almost always be a book for it, starting from the very basics, to niches and deeper explorations of a topic.

One of the things I have gained from furlough it rediscovering my love for learning, and a large part of this has been reading books on the topics I want to learn (for example, I recently read ‘economics for dummies’, because I realised that my understanding of economics, what certain economic terms mean, and why certain economic steps are taken, was lacking. Now, I feel much more capable of being able to read the news and understand what it means, and try to understand why it has happened, just from reading this book (though of course, I still come across things I have to look up – which is perfectly fine – but it is much better than not knowing where to start!).

Of course, reading a few books won’t make you an expert (I am not going to claim to be an economist – far from it). But at least it is a start! And it provides a starting block from which you can build on. And you may even learn things which help you in your working life!

4. Read to write

I enjoy writing, and have wanted to write a book even when I was a child. In fact, it is still a dream of mine to one day write a book. And of course, an important part of developing your writing is… Well, writing.

However, the second most important part of developing your writing is, I believe (though this may not apply to everyone), reading. Every book is a template on how to (or how not to) do it. If we read something we like in a book, we can try to break down exactly why we like it – what elements work well. If we read a book we do not enjoy, we can try to understand what didn’t work so well. Is it just that the book wasn’t for us, or was the book missing something? If the latter, what was the book missing?

I have heard/read many quotes from authors who have said that their writing-style is basically a mish-mash of many different authors whose books they have enjoyed. This does not surprise me. There is nothing wrong with this – you are not ‘copying’ another author’s style. Rather, you are building your knowledge and this then forms your writing style. In the same way that many argue that we are the sum of our experiences – we are not pretending to be someone else, we are just us.

Conclusion

So there you have it – the reasons behind why I read. Reading is something I have enjoyed for as long as I remember, and it is something that is still very important to me to this day, but I think this is probably the first time that I have actually thought about exactly why I read, other than the fact that I enjoy it.

I hope you enjoyed my second ‘Bookish Post’, and if you have your own reasons for reading, I would be very interested in hearing them! But for now, this post is an important reason as to why you should pop the kettle on, get yourself a hot drink, and grab a book to read!

TBT