Why Read Books?

Or, People Don’t Read. Or, We Need More Connection and Empathy

Mark Twain, American author and humorist, once said that a “classic” is a book “everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” I’ve always found this quote humorous, given that his work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn landed him squarely in the canon of Classic American Literature, alongside work like Moby Dick, The Scarlett Letter, The Great Gatsby, and To Kill A Mockingbird.

If you google “reading classic literature,” the first items in the search to populate are lists of books everyone should read once, the fifty best classics to read, 100 classics recommended by the BBC, etc. Many of these classics are also cross referenced on banned book lists, having been outlawed for one reason or another.

As a former secondary English instructor and a current adjunct instructor of English at a local community college, I find this very interesting, because I generally meet with resistance about reading classic novels. When I assign a book like Jane Austen’s Persuasion or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, students often groan, sigh, and express concern. They’re worried it will be hard to read, even harder to understand, and far too long to be worth their while.

To be fair, I sometimes have these same concerns—classic literature and modern novels have diverged from one another in a number of ways (most of them to do with style), and that can really present challenges to us.

So this begs the question: why read classics?

It’s not a new question—we’ve been asking this for years now in education, trying to decide if reading classics really brings value to students—but despite the fact that we continue to kick it around, I’m not sure we have a definitive answer.

And, in light of a recent article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch titled “The Elite College Students that Can’t Read Books: to read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school,”¹ I think the question might need to be revised to this:

Why read books?

My bestie sent me a Marco Polo recently, telling me about a situation in which someone said to her “no one reads anymore.” Bestie, an avid reader, was shocked to hear someone say this so directly, particularly given the circumstances (a community study group), and asked me if I thought it was true.

I think the answer is, like most things, not as simple as that black and white statement.

Do people read?

Yes. Absolutely. Romantasy and New Adult novels are flying off the shelves. Kindles are wildly popular. Libraries are well-used (particularly in Wyoming) both virtually and in brick-and-mortar formats.

Do people read high level material that challenges them to think deeply about their opinions and biases?

Ahh. Well.

Some people certainly do, but plenty of people don’t.

Classics fall into this second category in most instances, because the language is challenging and it’s often filled with difficult or potentially upsetting realities.

In Horowitch’s article about Ivy League students who can’t read whole books, she writes, “High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.” It’s wild to me that students—the alleged creme de la creme of secondary schools in the US—admitted to the most expensive and exclusive universities in the US are unable to read long texts in their college lit courses.²

If you read that and thought, “I struggle with reading full length texts, like novels,” you’re not alone. In the past ten years, I’ve also experienced my own decline in immersing myself in a text. This change, given the prominence of smart phones, short media format, and social media, is no coincidence.

From childhood, I’ve been a voracious reader—my parents joked when I turned 16 that I wouldn’t be able to navigate around my town once I got my license because I spent so much time reading in the car as I grew up.³ I’ve always been able to crack a new book at the start of a flight and often be at the closing pages by the final descent.

But our world of sound bites and short videos seems to have dampened my reading stamina. I’m often frustrated with my lowered attention span for reading and have been working to rebuild that endurance.

So if I, a nearly forty-year-old elder millennial, am struggling with this issue, then I can’t be surprised by students’ struggle in this arena. And honestly, sometimes I wonder what hope there is for our younger generations, who are, by very little fault of their own, are so steeped in this digital culture of TikTok videos, YouTube shorts, and Instagram Reels.

Again, I come back to this question: in a world where you can have AI tell you a summary of a novel, or watch a TikTok video about it, why read books?

CS Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.” Reading is a powerful way of connecting to others, and I think we all understand that connection is at the heart of building thriving communities. We can see this in libraries, which are one of the last third spaces in the United States that has no expectation of consumerism.

In Wyoming, we had the highest number of library visits per person in 2022. Across the United States, attendance and participation in Library Programs has been going up since 2005. I can’t help but believe that use of libraries can only drive up the amount of reading in those who spend time in the library. After all, we know that kids who grow up in homes with books often head too school with a wider vocabulary than those who don’t.⁴

In education, there’s a concept called “strewing” (often used by homeschoolers, but also by classroom teachers), wherein you place books about a topic around the learning space but don’t direct students to them specifically. The idea is that when the conversation or curiosity comes up, the student can find the book for themself. Having attendance at library programming is, in my opinion, the ultimate example of strewing. Once in the library, people are surrounded by books and resources that might meet any number of needs.⁵

Library resources aside, there’s a compelling body of research that tells us reading is good for us: people who read regularly are happier, sleep better, and have higher levels of empathy.

In Ceridwen Dovey’s article “Can Reading Make You Happier?” in The New Yorker cites brain research that tells us about why reading develops empathy in people: “A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.”⁶

Isn’t that an amazing piece of information? When we read about someone that’s going through a completely different experience than our own, our brain is stimulated in the same places it would be if we were experiencing it ourselves.

George RR Martin once said, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” On a brain level, this is really true, and the wider our experiences, the more widespread our empathy, the more we are able to building connection and community.

Even if I have never been a Russian aviatrix bombing the Germans in World War II, I can experience some of that through reading Kate Quinn’s The Huntress. Though I’ve never uprooted my life and relationship to travel the world, I can see the perspective behind Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

So again, I ask: why read books?

I hope you’ve formed an answer to that by now, and see my own argument for why reading is critical to our mental health and communities.

As I wrap this up, I’ll share my conclusion, as a reader, teacher, and woman:

We should read books not only because it’s pleasurable, not only because it allows us to experience the world outside our own four walls, not only because it helps us build empathy; but also because these are things that allow us to build connection with those around us.

And as I look around the world today, it strikes me that we desperately need more connection with those around us--our friends, our neighbors, our community members, and far beyond that. We need empathy to understand their perspective and and needs, and connection to know that compromise is a place where we are able to take care of one another.

You made it to the end!

Thanks for reading.

1. This article is both shocking and not shocking to me. I’ve seen the trend in my teaching career. I’ve also had to scrub curriculum and remove reading material for groups of students that simply weren’t equipped to keep up. I recommend everyone read it.

2. Here’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down about Ivy League schools in this article. This piece really shines a light on issues with Ivy Leagues currently and what they are and are not, and what they actually have to offer to their students.

3. Interestingly enough, I’m a great navigator, though I did spend most of my time in the car reading.

4. This is correlative though, not causal. There are other factors that tend to track with having lots of books in the home that impact a child’s vocab acquisition.

5. If you haven’t, you should check your local library website for services available. For instance, my library has a notary public available, usually any time the library is open, for FREE. If you sell a horse trailer on a Sunday afternoon, you can get the title notarized for free at the library in the afternoon.

6. This is a fascinating article that also discusses Bibliotherapy and a number of other reading related ideas.