Reading

At one of the places I work I teach a very small, very high level non-credit course. It is fun, because we can actually talk about things. Every week I get the students to choose a topic for next week, and I look for materials about it, and we go from there.

Last week one of the guys wanted to talk about the difference between people who plan carefully and those who act on impulse. He had the idea from his recent reading that the most successful people in life were those who had a goal, and worked hard to achieve it. He wanted to know which kind of person I was. Did I have long-term goals?

I had to think about this. He had just made it sound like people without goals are doomed to be pathetic failures, and I didn't want to admit that long-term goals are not my forte. In the end I told him that my goal in life was to be surprised a lot, and that so far I have been very, very successful. I never know what is going to happen next, or what I will do.

This discussion eventually segued onto the topic of reading. I asked the same guy how much reading he did. He told me that he didn't read much, not like a friend he has who reads one or two books a day. He read only two or three books a week, and recently he had been reading a lot of biographies. He wanted to know what I thought about this. Was it better to read slowly and carefully, or to read fast and more?

I told him I thought it depended on the type of book you were reading. We talked about that a bit, then I asked the other three students (there were only four) how much reading they did. All three of them said that they didn't read books at all. Ever. They didn't seem ashamed to admit this, even though they are all university students in their third or fourth years. They don't even read textbooks. I asked. They said they didn't need to, to pass their courses, and since they found reading hard work and didn't enjoy it, what was the point?

Then one of them looked thoughtful.

"Do you think reading is good for anything?" he asked. "Do you think people should read?"

He really wanted to know.

How do you answer questions like that?

I told a colleague about this on the way home, and she told me that she had a Japanese friend with a PhD who was puzzled by the number of books my friend had in her house.

"Do you read them all?" the woman asked when she saw them.

My friend said she did.

"Why?" asked the PhD.

It was a great mystery to her that anybody would read when they didn't have to. She didn't read, not even in her own field. She hated reading.

I know most of my students don't like reading, but it's a bit depressing to find out that their professors don't read either.

How would you answer those questions? Why do you read? What is reading good for? Do you think people should read?