The Most Social Medium

Many of us are discouraged by the decline of reading, and what it portends for our society. Novels, poetry, and short stories continually lose ground to lighter fare -- to shallower but more social media, like Facebook and Twitter-where all our friends, real and virtual, can add their own dab to the never-ending conversation.

Reading books, on the other hand, is perceived to be a private pastime. It is, most would say, an intellectual pursuit, one that engages but one mind and is decidedly unsocial.

But the opposite is true. Reading is our culture's most social pursuit. It conscripts us into the larger society - of family, friends, neighbors...even the concealed parts of our own emotions. Books, especially novels and short stories, provide us with communion of a different kind. By reading, we discover we're not so different ... or ever alone. We see that others have felt and done and known the same things we have; that, as 1Corinthians 10:13 tells us, "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man." We are, books teach us, connected to one another, not just now, but through time and events and all the trials any of us has ever known.

What's more, reading books brings us face-to-face with capable authors, and into relationships with them that are unlike anything you can know through correspondence of less than 150 characters.

Writer and teacher Arnold Weinstein puts it wonderfully. Books, he says, "are a force field of coursing energy, containing the still living pulse of both the artist and his or her time, made accessible by the simple miracle of reading. The encounter with literature adds to who we are," he continues. Books are a reflecting pool; they solicit "our entry and immersion, they gift us with a new sense of self, and a new awareness of our actual dimensions."

Sources that prompted these thoughts:

Weinstein, Arnold. A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. New York: Random House, 2003.