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Column: Like Endless Rain into a Paper Cup

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on April 4, 2010 10:18 PM

By Karen Kovaka, Gavel Writer -

We’ve all heard some variation of the horrifying statistic – that only 1 in 4 American adults finish reading even a single book in a given year. I can’t imagine it. There hasn’t been a single year out of the last twenty in which I haven’t read (or had read to me) dozens of books. The thought of not finishing even one book a year is so removed from my experience it almost seems impossible.

That is, as long as I think of reading as skimming a text for information. If I adopt a more rigorous definition of reading that includes gaining not only information but also understanding, such as the one Mortimer Adler uses in How to Read a Book, then it’s much easier to imagine myself going for an extended period of time without actually reading anything. Adler says we can think of the art of reading as “the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more.” This sort of reading requires entering deeply into the words on the page. It requires an attempt to go beyond the obvious and a stubborn search for a meaning that is not apparent to a quick glance.

This kind of reading is in need of defense at Boston College. While it’s valid for us to avoid closely reading books that professors assign if we think the books themselves are not valuable, the tendency is to skim the books that address the topics that are closest to our hearts. A couple weeks ago, I gave Darwin’s Origin of Species the most cursory reading possible, even though philosophy of science and the environment is, to me, one of the most interesting things in the world.

This tendency alarms me when I see it in myself. It’s not that hard to get an A without carefully reading the assigned material, and because of this, it’s extremely hard to make myself read well, given the other activities competing for my time. Excuses like this miss the point, however. Reading isn’t supposed to happen only when we’re cloistered away somewhere, when there’s nothing else to do. On the contrary, I think reading is supposed to be the kind of thing we have to fight to make time for in the midst of many enticing ways to spend time. We don’t get the benefit of it until it’s a quest and a struggle.

Here are two reasons why I think good reading is worth fighting for, even given the hectic swirl of events that compose our lives. The first is that good reading makes one more sophisticated. There is value in being able to assess the general shape of a situation and to avoid unnecessary details. However, if these skills aren’t balanced by seeing the intricacies and nuances of a situation, then one’s ability to judge and evaluate circumstances runs the risk of becoming crude and easily deceived. Good reading helps one practice identifying complexities that lie underneath the ‘main point.’ It helps one become cleverer at following someone else’s mind and at interpreting the true meanings behind the (often confusing) words that people use to express themselves.

The second is that good reading brings insight. Having a profound insight as a result of reading a great book requires not only that the book itself be profound, but also that the reader be willing to immerse herself in the process that the author has designed. The Brothers Karamazov is a thousand pages long for a reason. Dostoevsky means for the insights he has to impart to cost the reader all the time and confusion and bewilderment that are inherent in a good reading of the novel. This book has fundamental truths to give to anyone who takes it seriously, but it is simply not possible to ‘get it’ by skimming. The only way to understand what the book means is to concentrate fully on the text and to engage it in all of its difficulty.

This list of reasons could be extended for pages. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by fighting to make time to read some (though of course not all) books well. The habit of skimming is all too easy to pick up, and it requires concentration and effort to avoid it. John Lennon famously tells us that ‘words are flying out like/endless rain into a paper cup/they slither while they pass/they slip away across the universe.’ We need to keep trying to catch them.