George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame, besides being an endlessly frustrating old codger – and not releasing that next novel in the series -, has one of my all-time favorite quotes on reading: “I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.” It perfectly frames how much better our lives are because of reading.
I’ve been fascinated by books and reading from an early age. I sifted first through comics when I was five. I don’t remember seeing my family, or any other kid’s buying books for babies and toddlers at the time. It was the early 90s, post-communist Romania. A stark contrast to the present day. My 1-year-old son already sports a small library of a few dozen books at his age.
I started opening books with a somewhat external curiosity. A rarity rather than something that was readily available to kids my age at the time. An image of the huge wall-sized bookcase in my parent’s living room remained with me for a long time throughout this period. It was full of older editions of classics and Romanian writers with yellowed pages & the musty smell typical of old books. They were both engineers and well-read, and hearing them tell the story, reading was one of the few pastimes they had available in their youth. Theirs was an age far removed from mainstream media. It was something I saw only from time to time only while raised by my grandparents, simple folk with primary school education only. My grandfather was a plumber, and my grandmother a seamstress. Childhood stories were oral hand-me-downs rather than read works. The only other contact I had with these mysterious tomes full of text was in school. Those of us part of this post-industrial education system all know how enticing that can be. Even the best novels were slapped with a compulsory stick and become undesirable homework.
I read my first novel aged nine or ten, in my first year after finally moving into my parent’s household in Bucharest. It was Winnetou by Karl May. I read through the whole four volumes of it in a matter of weeks, something of a feat for that time, but less so if you account for not going out of the house at all and spending every scrap of free time in the company of Old Shatterhand and tribal chief Winnetou. Their exploits, a grand adventure that I had the privilege of joining, and that sense of wonder, thrill, and discovery are still powerful in my memory today. An experience many young readers share with this particular novel.
During those years being outside was the major pastime for kids my age. Parents didn’t quite know what to do to keep us inside the house. An ironic reversal of today’s world where the opposite is the norm. Even so in the next few years, as the country was more and more influenced by the western powers that be, we started having a steadier influx of western literature, and genres like fantasy and sci-fi made their way to book markets, if not the average bookshop.
I snagged a copy of Lord of the Rings, which was my first real dive into high fantasy. Harry Potter followed suit in 2001 when a relative living in the west sent me the first English volume. It was The Chamber of Secrets. Yes, I started Harry Potter with the second volume. Shortly thereafter, its commercial success meant it was also translated into Romanian -with some unfortunate and at times hilarious uses of proper names-. At 13 I was devouring The goblet of fire, a massive 700-page tome in a single day.
By high-school reading became a regular hobby, and there was rarely a time throughout my life since then when I wasn’t reading one book or another. The musty classics in the aforementioned home library were no longer a mystery and reading was a regular escape for this anxious teenager. Along with gaming. They go hand in hand at times.
I find myself drawn to books at all times, whether it’s a paperback, my kindle, and even my phone, or that next library purchase. Of late, reading takes a large chunk of my spare time and I’ve completely replaced many habits to focus on it. I realized that reading 50 books a year is actually something that doesn’t require a concentrated effort and dedication and can be easily achieved in the busiest of times, like running a business and raising a baby, without a particularly stellar reading speed. It’s my favorite pastime with what I’ve found is the best return on time spent, accumulating knowledge. And as Warren Buffet puts it: It builds up, like compound interest.
From the most basic perks, simple joy, boast rights or improving our vocabulary, reading opens new avenues of thought and provides the critical perspective shift that is required for empathy building. What other better way of getting intimate with another’s person’s thoughts and feelings do we have available? How better to immerse ourselves in the endless worlds of imagination that other people’s brilliant minds cook up.
I love reading, and at times it saddens me that there are still so many who haven’t discovered the joy, wonderful exploration, and learning opportunity that any good book brings. More than anything I think it’s critical to use reading as a tool to build up our critical and creative thinking abilities, key elements of navigation in today’s ocean of high-speed information.
I’d like to close with Baba Brinkman’s letter from the volume A velocity of being: letters to a young reader by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick, “a collection of 121 letters by authors, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and philosophers about the impact reading has had on their lives.”
“Dear reader,
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said that books are read for one of two reasons: “One, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
Those might be our primary motives for reading, but I can think of more. A third motive is a conversational enrichment. I have friends who don’t read and I value them as friends, but I also notice the frequent cul-de-sacs our conversations wander into. Resisting the urge to boast while simply changing the subject is no great burned compared to the regretful awareness of paths left untraveled. A book is a passport down those roads.
The enjoyment we get from books is hardly different from watching TV in some ways, but escaping into a book also subtly exercises parts of the mind untouched by visual media. We read for fun and experience curious side effects. Just as our bodies have a muscle memory when riding a bicycle, our minds have “muscles’ for empathy and perspective-taking that reading stretches and strengthens. The expansiveness that comes from thinking someone else’s thoughts and seeing through someone else’s eyes is the chief gift bestowed by the written word. That’s a fourth motive: reading helps us “get” people.
At a certain point, I started reading mostly non-fiction, figuring I needed to better understand the world around me. Daily life is full of truths unseen connections unappreciated, and mysteries unexplored. A life can be lived happily and honorably within the fishbowl of its own natural perceptions, but there is nothing like reading to remove scales from the glass. An expanded awareness of how things connect, how the world is organized, and how people behave is of immense strategic value when it comes to accomplishing goals and pursuing dreams. Motive number five: reading unlocks doors.
There are lots of motives for adding new apps to your smartphone: you can play with them, you can boast about them, or you can put them to a million other uses. What apps are to smartphones, books are to brains. That’s what they seem like to me anyway. What do you see in them?
Your friend in curiosity, Baba Brinkman”
Thank you for reading,
Andrei