In our fast paced electronic world today who has time for books anymore? Even if we had the time why should we spend it reading a book? After all, anything we want to know we can Google and have our answer in an instant. What possible reason, then, could compel the modern man to stop, sit down and read a book from cover to cover? Honestly it is a difficult and daunting task to try and convince a person of today to give reading a book a try. If they want entertainment they have movies, television and an iPod/iPhone for that. If they want to know something they do not already know then there is Google and Wikipedia for that. It seems then that books have outlasted their purposes and are antiquated mediums for things we can now access so much more expediently.
One of the greatest difficulties of convincing such a person that they ought to read books is that they wouldn’t read an argument for doing so. If they started to read an essay like this one they probably would have stopped at the end of the first paragraph and said “exactly.” But for those who would continue reading I am probably preaching to the choir by now. Even so, let us discuss the matter of why people ought to read books, lots of them, and good ones. After all someone might read on by the grace of God and those of us who are already convinced can at least sharpen our thoughts on the matter and then make a Youtube video to try and convince the others.
One of the best reasons for becoming bookish, that is, for becoming a person who surrounds themselves with good books and actually reads them, is because books communicate both entertainment and knowledge in ways those other mediums cannot. Consider, for instance, how the mind interacts with the written word in a story as opposed to how it engages a movie. Had you never seen the movie adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but only read the book, what might Orcs have looked like in your mind? Consider further if you had read it for the first time when you were twelve years old rather than thirty years old? Do you think that the way your mind would have imagined Orcs would be the same when you were twelve as opposed to thirty? Likely not.
One of the important differences between story in books versus story in film is that it is the mind of the person reading a book who sets the limits on mental images and conception of characters and events. Certainly words can paint a gruesome picture at times but, generally speaking, our minds can limit a character in our imagination to what we can handle. So a twelve year old conception of an Orc is not nearly so gruesome and horrifying as what a thirty year old might conceive of. Yet when we experience an Orc in the movie version of The Lord of the Rings one’s mind is filled (indeed forced) by someone else’s depiction and whether you are ready for it or not, there it is. In this way the visual arts and film are more violent towards the mind because they force upon us at once images that can never be unseen whereas books allow our own experiences to shape how we see an perceive characters and events. While other reasons could be given for seeking our entertainment from books rather than movies or television the freedom of mind, and in some cases the security of it, is a good reason. Movies imagine for you and they tell the audience what they must see and therefore both limit the imagination of some or hoist upon the minds of other something they weren’t ready for. Books allow the audience to see any number of realities as the story churns on but movies paint one blunt picture without any give.
How about when it comes to gaining information? Why are books more valuable than our instant resources like Google or Wikipedia? One of the primary reasons they are better is because they give us rooted information rather than disconnected information. By rooted I mean information that is fixed within a context to help gain a more meaningful understanding. What is better, I ask, to learn a word by looking it up in a dictionary or to learn it by reading it being used in context? How much more likely are you to understand the nuances of that word and how it relates to the real world if you discover it in conversation rather than on the word of the day calendar? This is not only the case with vocabulary but when you read books you learn about people, cultures, eras, philosophies and more and you experience them as living and breathing things rather than cold isolated factoids. Information is meant to be learned and experiences in context because we are not trivia machines that are meant to learn answers to questions but then not really understand our own answers.
These are but a couple of simple reasons to become bookish and a great many more could be given. Most of those reasons come back to the same basic idea, however, that books engage the mind in a way no other medium does and they provide a tailored experience to each person. As Schall has said “The same book can move another’s will and understanding differently than it does our own. We ourselves are receptive to different books at different times in our lives. It is quite possible for one to get nothing out of reading a book, whereas someone else, reading the same book, goes out and changes the world.”
