Why I Read

What’s the point of sitting for hours over the course of a week and reading made-up stories about people who never lived? I know people who don’t read at all because they think it’s a waste of time. And I know other people who read non-fiction but consider fiction a waste of time. I know people who believe that reading fiction is some kind of unhealthy indulgence, like eating a whole block of imported cheese.

Personally, I prefer to eat imported cheese while I’m reading made-up stories about people who never lived.

When I speak of fiction, I mean the kind that transports you to a world that’s more real than the chair in which you’re sitting or the book in your hand. The characters are more real than some people you know because they suffer what you have suffered, perhaps not in detail but in depth and breath. They love the way that you have loved and hate the way you have hated. They tell you something about yourself, and they lay bare humanity so that you understand what you could not comprehend before. While fiction might be “made up,” it’s real in the true sense of the word.

William Faulkner’s portrayals of the outcast, uncomprehending children of “white-trash” moves me to a place well beyond tears where I feel a sense of dread for them because I know that when the child Vardaman says, “My mother is a fish,” in As I Lay Dying, he’s trying to understand his mother’s death in the absence of an adult who takes any responsibility for his emotional state. I know that such families exist and that children always fill in their gaps of understanding with imagination.

In Peace Like a River, I know why Reuban sees his brother Davy as the hero of the story even though he killed a man—because siblings have a string that runs from one to the other, and even though most of us don’t chase ours across the Badlands when they’ve escaped the local jail, we know what it is to feel them jerk the string and send fear and pain running through us. The string holds, though, and in that way, the characters in PLAR are true though not real.

I know people who brag about reading the great books when they were still children. I did not. I read the best literature that was appropriate for my age, and I’m glad I did. I cried when the yearling had to be shot, and I squirmed when Meg told her brother that she loved him over and over because I was at that age when anything mushy made me squirm with embarrassment. I didn’t read Lord of the Rings until I was, as I recall, twenty-two. It consumed me. I was old enough then to understand that good and evil do indeed battle and to understand that both good and bad people suffer and die. I knew that heroes don’t always live up to their promise, yet believed and still believe that love and peace prevail, if only for a while.

In these books and so many more, I have learned and do learn to feel more deeply and to understand more profoundly. So to those who argue that reading fiction is a waste of time, I would say that human beings have, since recorded time, told or read stories because those stories both teach us to be more human and help us to understand what being human is, neither of which could possibly be a waste of time.