As a kid, my mom would always encourage me to read. I read, yes, but it was never really anything that I did regularly. In fact, I really don’t remember much of what except that I read books like Judy Blume’s Super Fudge during elementary school or parts of Dante’s Inferno during high school. Nothing really stuck with me or had a huge impact on my upbringing. I really didn’t start reading, extensively, until I decided to pursue my degrees in English and literature. Since then, I’ve read something, in some form, everyday.

I’ve always viewed myself as a slow reader, which has hindered my ability to read as extensively as I’d like to read. However, my speed has increased over the years, allowing me to read more. Over the past few years, I’ve tracked my reading with apps. I started with Good Reads a few years back but migrated to Story Graph sometime last year. These apps have helped me keep track of my reading habits and have provided me with a way to save books that I want to read sometime in the future. Ultimately, they have caused me to think about the fact that no matter how many texts I want to read I will never be able to read them all.

At this point in the year, I’ve read 46 books, not including articles from news outlets, academic articles, comic book issues, and more. That means I can assume that I will read about 72 books during 2023. If I extrapolate that out, I will read 720 over the next ten years and roughly 2,160 books before I die. To me, that doesn’t seem like a large number considering the number of books in the world. In fact, it seems rather minuscule, a grain of sand on a beach. Yet, the average person in the United States reads 12 books a year. That number, of course, comes from the average of all book readers, meaning that the numbers get skewed some with people who read as many as 100 or 200 books a year. A better way to think about this, as Chris Arnone puts it, is to look at the median. When we do that, the average dips down to 4 books per year.

Reading is linked to literacy which is linked to education levels, poverty, and other factors. Looking at 2016, Arnone points out “that if 72% of people were reading at least one book a year in 2016, then 28% weren’t reading even one.” In 2022, 75% of Americans read at least one book, which means that 25% did not read a book. Breaking that down, the US population is 2022 was 338,289,857, so that means that 84,572,464 did not read a book that year. Why does that matter? Why should we care? Is reading that important?

As I wrote about in “What is the Purpose of Literature in Public Life?” reading causes us to encounter the world around us and to interact with it in a way that leads us to examine our position within society. It also expands our understanding of others, seeing the world from their point of view, thus creating, hopefully, increased empathy within ourselves. Finally, and this is not an exhaustive list, reading helps us to think critically. We must sit with the words and parse them out, breaking apart the meaning and testing it against ourselves and our beliefs. Reading does all of these things, and more.

Yet, when we don’t read, we become unable to parse out the rhetoric we encounter through media outlets, popular culture, or conversations. We sink into ourselves, only allowing the voices we agree with to infiltrate our barriers. Thus, we cocoon ourselves, shutting out any view point that differs from our own. This can occur with reading to, yes, but reading, as I’ve said, causes us to sit with ourselves. We have no one else around to argue with except ourselves and the words on the page.

Reading does shine a mirror in our face, and it also expands our understanding past soundbites or headlines. Over the past few years, I’ve been reading more history, specifically, as you know if you have been reading my blog for a while, books on fascism and World War II. Plus, I’ve been reading books such as Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, a book I read immediately after Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest. Reading these two books close together highlighted the importance of critical reading skills even if someone reads more than 4 books in a year.

Later, I found out that Mishra reviewed Ferguson’s book, and Mishra’s comments encapsulated my feelings about Ferguson’s text. As Mishra puts it, Ferguson “sets up a dichotomy that is profoundly false in many ways, and of course patronising to the people he lumps together as (his word) ‘resterners’. That’s quite apart from his appropriation — in his main title — of the word ‘civilization’ to cover only the (mainly) capitalist world and the materialist values associated with it.” When I read Ferguson’s book, his asides about imperialism not being a bad word or things such as women loving Isaac Singer for his sewing machine right after Ferguson points out that Singer had more than 20 children with 4 different women left a sour taste in my mouth and clouded even a modicum of agreement with Ferguson’s overall positions because these asides highlighted his clear positions.

Mishra and Ferguson both focus on imperialism and “civilization” and the decline of Western influence in the world. Ferguson presents his argument in a patronizing manner as he recycles the argument that imperialism brought “civilization” to “savage” and “uncivilized” people. Mishra, however, points out through his exploration of anti-imperialist thought in Asia from Lian Qichao in China and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the Ottoman Empire, the historical underpinnings that inform our contemporary world. As I read Mishra, I began to see, in greater detail, the road leading up to Islamic fundamentalism and Chinese posturing and the roles that the United States, Britain, France, and other imperial powers had in their construction.

Now, someone could read both of these books and have different positions from me. They could agree with Ferguson and disagree with Mishra. That is true. However, in order to do that, they would have to spend more time engaging with each one instead of just sitting in front of the television listening to a newscast for thirty minutes or flipping on the radio in the car during their commute to and from work. They could not rely on soundbites and quick clips to formulate their positions. They must wrestle with what they read and think about it in detail, not just in passing. This is the role of reading. This is why reading extensively is important.

I’ll never be able to read everything I want to read. It is humanely impossible to do that. But, I know that reading those remaining 2,160 books will have an impact on me and my thinking. I won’t agree with everything I read; however, I will have engaged with it. I will have engaged with it and formulated my own opinions apart from soundbites and quick takes. I will have learned more about others and the world around me, hopefully leading me to a better understanding of myself.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.