Reading

Why reading is Dangerous
Not every book is broccoli and spinach.

By Anthony Doerr

Pretend you’ve just walked into a doctor’s office. You sign your name on the little clipboard. The receptionist peers up at you through smudged eyeglasses. “Could be a while,” she says.

You take the last empty seat in the waiting room. A nauseous-looking child rocks back and forth in the chair to your left. A portly salesman in the chair to your right blows his nose.

The minutes tick past. The child moans. All through the room, you can sense microorganisms, breeding, proliferating.

But—you have in your bag a secret weapon, a small scrap of magic: a stack of pages between two boards. A book.

You open the cover, read a few sentences, and there it is: the miracle of language. The salesman, the turbid fish tank, the billowing clouds of microbes disappear. You slip inside a line of words, the waiting room drops away, and you, the 15th patient on your doctor’s next-to-be-seen list, vanish.

You’re on a raft, floating down the Mississippi, or you’re riding a whaling ship through the South Seas, or you’re trapped in a dull marriage in the French countryside, and here comes the aristocratic, handsome Rodolphe.

Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language: When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death. When you’re engrossed in a book, you can shed the material complications of your body in a sentence and become the opposite sex; you can become 6 years old or 76; you can be a Japanese sailor or an Indian surgeon or a Martian explorer; you can be Ishmael, or a giant, perplexed cockroach.

You read for a half hour, or until a nurse calls your name. Then you look up. You realize your hand is cramped, your leg is asleep, the salesman is gone. Time has mysteriously compressed.

And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

In August, the Associated Press quizzed 1,003 American adults about their reading habits. One in four admitted to not having read a book in the past year. “Fiction just doesn’t interest me,” said one of the respondents. “If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie.”

This sort of poll, it seems, comes out every year. In 2005, Gallup surveyed 1,006 adults and found that only 47 percent of them happened to be reading a book at the time. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a demoralizing report, Reading at Risk, which found, among other things, that less than half of Americans “read literature” and that the percentage of literary readers in the country since 1992 had declined at a startling rate.

Newspapers tend to cover these surveys under headlines like “One in Four Adults Read No Books Last Year” or “We Stack Up Poorly as Nation of Readers,” or “Welcome to the United States of the Unread.” Bloggers deplore our nation’s lack of curiosity; editorial pages lament. Who’s to blame? E-mail. The Internet. Netflix, iTunes, Paris Hilton.

So we give our kids reading tests, we give them 3-pound textbooks, we offer incentive-based, read-your-books-and-eat-your-vegetables approaches. Read these two pages summarizing Shakespeare’s plays, Timmy, and then you can go play Halo 3. Finish that chapter on Hamlet, Claire, and take a computerized reading comprehension test, and you’ll earn three stars on your reading chart.

In most cases these are natural, credible approaches. The message to young people is obvious: Books are good for you. And that’s true. Books are good for us. But what’s missing, sometimes, from an otherwise cogent and always well-intentioned public debate is the idea that sustained reading can be dangerous.

And I mean dangerous in a good way. I mean the kind of danger that cracks apart our routines, shows us what we’ve been taking for granted, helps us perceive the world with new eyes.

Books can be mind-blowing, unpredictable, bawdy, and frighteningly addictive. Books can destroy the divisions between nations, between foundations of thought, and between fantasy and reality. Books can force readers into some strange and terrifying places. Look at Galileo, or Darwin, or Salman Rushdie. 

I’ve missed appointments because of a book, sat on an airplane until it was completely empty because of a book, and stayed up way too late because of a book. Books have made me forget meals, forget to weed the garden, and forget to listen to my wife.

Consider poor Madame Bovary! Lovely Emma read too many romance novels, and the next thing she knew she was cheating on her husband, running up huge debts, and putting fistfuls of arsenic in her mouth. Too many chivalric romances drove the famous Don Quixote into psychosis, too. Eventually, he couldn’t tell the difference between a belligerent giant and a windmill.

Aren’t pleasure and danger bound up with each other? Isn’t it good, sometimes, to do things that are dangerous? Isn’t it important to read books about poverty, about ancient wars, about the infinitesimal place of our solar system in the universe? Even if reading about these things is scary?

Pretty much every night of their lives, my little sons, now 3 years old, have sat on someone’s lap and paged through books. They used to point out pictures, colors; now they notice letters. They ask for another book, and another, and another. What they remind me, every evening, is that books are not always alfalfa sprouts and wheatgrass and parboiled eggplant; books are not always giant horse pills stuffed with multivitamin dust. Some books are roasted lobsters soaked with butter; some are molten tubs of dark chocolate; some are luminescent piles of narcotics. Just ask any 9-year-old who has stayed up half the night reading Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia. Just ask any teenager with his nose deep in William Burroughs or Stephen King, or ask anyone on a long flight with a paperback spy novel.

According to the Associated Press, women read an average of nine books last year. Nine is a pretty respectable number, isn’t it? The poll even found a retired nurse in Florida who said she’d read 70 books in the last year.

But it takes only one—one book that reaches inside you and shifts things around, expands your sense of who you are, and opens up that little conduit of magic. Once you find it, once you’ve felt that tidal pull, that danger, you’ll be a reader for the rest of your life.

There were a lot of exceptional books for me, but there was one in particular. I read it when I was 14. It was written by another young teen, a girl who died in a concentration camp in 1945, two months before the liberation of Holland. Her name was Anne Frank.

I see the eight of us here in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we’re standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We’re surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other.

That has everything to do with the power and magic of reading—the darkness, and the danger, and the little trembling packets of magic that are words. It may sound odd to say that The Diary of Anne Frank brought me pleasure, but it did—a pleasure in uncovering that magic that transforms your personal geography, cultivates your sense of empathy, and cracks your heart wide open. A magic that sooner or later turns you into a
confirmed addict.

We read because we love stories, because we crave new ideas, because of the chance that tomorrow we might choose a book from a shelf, open it, and feel a connection with another person’s heart. A connection that transcends the barriers of continents and oceans and generations and death, and lets us stare into the soul of someone we’ve never met, never could meet.

We read because we are curious about the world. And though it’s probably hard to remember sometimes, we read because of the mysterious—and dangerous—magic of language.

Anthony Doerr is the author of the new memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World (Scribner).

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Get started changing our country’s reading statistics by picking up a new book. Various news outlets offered best-books-of-the-year lists last December: The New York Times (100 Notable and 10 Best), Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Salon, The Economist, Newsweek, Slate, and The Christian Science Monitor. 

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