The End of Reading

Here on my website I have lists of the books I’ve read every year since 2003. In the course of a decade, the tally is somewhere around 800, I think, which, when I stop to think about it, is a pretty big number.

Reading isn’t all I do, of course. During the past decade I finished college, worked several jobs, traveled the world, participated in the life of a local church wherever I found myself, went to grad school, served on two nonprofit boards, spent quality time with friends, moved across the country, joined a softball league, and most monumental of all, got married. Oh, and yesterday we got the keys to our first home! Reading is what I’ve done when I haven’t been doing those other things.

Living in a wealthy, highly-literate country like the United States, you’d think everybody would read books. And, in fact, most do… though most do so only very occasionally. In 2012, 75% of Americans ages 16 and over read at least one book. Of those who have read at all over the past year, however, the median number of books read was six. That’s an average of one book every two months. And studies are clear that these reading habits are on the decline.

Now, I certainly wouldn’t argue that the length of a person’s book list is the measure of a life well-lived. A larger number of books is not automatically better. As John Wesley put it, “Beware you be not swallowed up in books: an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”

As a reminder to myself – and, by extension, to anyone who stumbles upon my online reading list – I have that Wesley quote emblazoned at the top of my aforementioned reading page, along with this statement of personal belief:

If we had to choose between loving and reading, we’d certainly do well to choose the former. My hunch, though, is that the discipline of reading widely and well is a crucial part of loving God with our minds and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Nonetheless, it’s still certainly possible to read irresponsibly – to use reading as a substitute for loving our neighbors, cultivating a craft, being a good citizen, or enjoying God’s good creation. Those of us who read a lot need to guard against this.

But I loved what Enuma Okoro recently had to say on the Her.meneutics blog about the importance of reading for leading holy, engaged lives:

Reading and writing as a way of engaging the holy is not a new idea, and yet, we don’t consider it enough anymore as a viable way to make small pockets of sanity and sense within the various wards of our crazy human existence. Perhaps this is in part due to the growing and saddening decline of reading in general. In a 2007 report, the National Endowment for the Arts shared some frightening figures in the decline of reading among Americans over the years, starting with teens and extending through adulthood. Almost half of American young adults between 18 and 24 never read for pleasure. And reading, according to the report, correlates with social and civic engagement. The more we read the more involved we tend to be in our communities. Bookworms do actually inch their way outside and into the world, more so than non-readers it seems.

For those who aren’t inclined to read books as a consistent discipline, maybe this will prompt you to give it a try. And for those of us whose book-reading has begun to devolve into a selfish form of escapism, I hope we’ll see anew that our reading should not – indeed, must not – end with us.

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