What is Reading?
Marianne Janack
The first time I taught my course Philosophy as/and/of Literature in 2019, I asked the class on the first day, “How many of you like to read?” A few hands went up around the room—of 30 students, about 20 of them raised their hands. But then one student hesitantly raised his hand and said, “Well, what do you mean by reading? I mean, I like to read short articles in Scientific American, or news articles, but I don’t know if that counts.”
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When I taught Philosophy of Science in 2023, one student told me that she hadn’t bought the book for the class--it was an anthology of classic essays and articles —instead she looked online for free pdfs of the articles we were reading. Buying books didn’t seem like a good use of money, she said—her parents had read an article by a money person about how to save money on college, and he had recommended saving money on books. I pointed out that the book wasn’t that expensive—it was $39.95, and, I said, if time was money, she was probably better off buying the book.
“When I was growing up, we didn’t have room for books in our little apartment,” she told me and the other 9 students in the class. “I think owning books is an elitist practice, since it requires that you have space for them, which a lot of people don’t. It’s a performance of learning and of privilege.” I thought about the little house I grew up in, most of its surfaces covered in newspapers, books, or magazines, and the office in which my books live: four walls of bookshelves with at least a thousand books. My Kindle and Audible libraries—my invisible library—each have about 20 titles in them. Some of these books I’ve read, some I’ve been meaning to read, some I’ve partially read, some I want to own just in case I need them in the future. An anti-elitist’s nightmare: a performance of knowledge and aspirations to knowledge.
The desk, table, and chairs in my office are still covered with books, magazines, and other papers, though, so the bookcases seem like a second thought and the performance seems aesthetically marred. My house is full of books and magazines, too. A Marie Kondo nightmare.
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My Philosophy of Science student’s argument isn’t an argument against reading, though: it’s an argument against owning (or buying) books. And one can imagine an argument like this that is based on an opposition to the idea that one ought to pay authors or editors of books or articles—that copyright itself is a problem. There’s a certain bad-assery about this: fuck the establishment! Fuck capitalism! Information should be free!
In such a case, the student has taken a stand. Buying books is politically regressive, and if one is going to be a good progressive, one should take this stand. And, of course, libraries are for the people.
But there’s also a niggling suspicion that I have that this is less bad-assery and more cheap-skatery. After all, students and their parents often pay for other things (iPads, fashionable clothes, jewelry, cars) and they often refuse to buy books because they say that they are trying to save money. I usually point out to students that they can resell books, but they often complain about the prices they get for used books, or they find it too much effort.
So maybe students and their parents just don’t think buying books or reading material is the way that they want to spend money. It’s not an all-out rejection of the idea of ownership, it’s just a value choice. At least this would point toward an evaluation: I don’t think this is worth spending money on. I have an idea about what kind of person I should be, and buying books doesn’t fit with that ideal.
But is there an ideal or an evaluation that says that reading itself (rather than book owning) is at odds with the type of person one wants to be?
There used to be: reading used to be thought to be a way of letting someone else control your mind. Reading was reserved for slaves—free men (and, of course, they were all men) didn’t compromise their autonomy in this way.
And in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the idea that novel reading—especially in private—was immoral or could lead to an erosion of one’s character wasn’t uncommon. Similar arguments show up in discussions of the ethics of reading certain kinds of stories or books: I think of the debates about reading Lolita, for instance, but of course censorship of all sorts is motivated by this concern. Aristotle, in fact, thought that the wrong kinds of experiences could coarsen one’s character.
Human agency, Charles Taylor says, involves decisions about what kind of person one wants to be—what he calls “strong evaluation”. But most of the pessimistic discussion of the drop in the number of people who read for fun does not argue that people are taking a stand against reading–rather, the argument is that people prefer other kinds of entertainment, or have lost the ability to read complicated and nuanced writing, or that the testing regime for high school reading has focused on content, and as a result has made reading books more about repeating the right answers about content than about enjoying the process of reading.
So the argument is that people are not acting as agents, but are, instead, passively becoming non-readers. They would like to be readers, but they can’t resist their conditioning by school, their screens, or testing.
Or maybe they don’t really think much about being readers? Maybe they are mostly thinking about jobs, or saving money, or sports, or socializing–and, in fact, maybe it has always been thus.
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When I taught my Philosophy as/and/of literature course again last semester, I asked the class how many of them liked to read. Most of the students in the class raised their hands. But when we got near the end of the semester and were reading a book about the reading experience, a number of students came to class with the same “take aways”--when I checked on this, it turned out that all their “take aways” were summarized on Google. Maybe they’d read the book AND the Google summaries, but I got the impression that that wasn’t so. When I asked one student about this, she said, “there’s just no really enough time to read and enjoy a long book.” I understand this–when I was in college, reading for pleasure wasn’t on my list of things to do. I was too busy with other things. And reading was a job–it was part of my work for my classes.
When my students leave the classroom with their phones in hand, I’m pretty sure they’re reading texts (often from their parents, who should know better); when I see them staring into their computer screens, it’s often text-based media that they’re looking at. So it’s not clear that people are reading less–but they do seem to be reading for different reasons. So what do we mean by ‘reading’?