4 New Reasons Why You Need to be Reading Literature
I’m about to tell you why you need to be reading. No, not just reading: reading books. And not just books: reading literature. I already feel like your mother telling you to eat more veggies or Elite Daily dispensing serious life advice in list form, so I’ll try to keep the moralizing and pandering to a minimum. Like me you probably waste a lot of your free time staring at one screen or another and like me you probably feel guilty about it. You probably have a vague sense that you should be reading more, but nobody builds lasting habits like reading based on a murky sense of guilt. To make this change you need solid, concrete reasons and hey! Waddaya know! I’ve got 4 right here!
1.It’ll Take a Load Off
You know what I think is so shitty about teen angst? Everyone thinks they’re the first and only person to experience it. We’re all spoon-fed pretty similar ideas on The World and How it Works growing up, and we all think we’re the first ones to find out how much of that is contradictory or just bullshit. We feel betrayed by Disney, DARE, and Dad, so we shoulder the burden of figuring out this awful existence alone.
The emotional coarseness of teen angst is smoothed out naturally over time, but most of us never really come up with a better way to deal with alienation than the same basic blueprint of rumination; we never totally move on from the notion that our problems are uniquely ours. When we read, we see that people across space and time have waded through the same psychic muck as us. This is not the same as telling someone who is suffering that other people have been through the same or worse; this is the uncanny experience of seeing your own feelings articulated in a way that you wish you could have done for yourself. The insights of great literature illuminate our problems and give us just enough objective distance, enough breathing room, to see what it is we’re up against. Shit is a lot less scary when we see it plainly for what it is.
2. Do it For Science
We’ve become junkies for stats, graphs, and percents: the real truth brought to you by The Hard Sciences. For some of you none of the shit you read in this article will matter except for this little block here devoted to the empirical, scientifically proven benefits of reading. Luckily for literature, there is no shortage of hard-as-a-rock data backing up the cognitive and psychological benefits of reading.
Studies have linked reading with significant growth in white matter, which helps the different regions of the brain work in sync more effectively. Reading has also been linked to improvements in cognitive ability or IQ. Metrics like crystallized intelligence (the ability to use the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired ) and different metrics of verbal intelligence like completing analogies and reading comprehension have both been shown to increase with reading literature.
One of the most recent and to my mind fucking coolest things we have confirmed reading can do is to give us the closest thing to having experiences from somebody else’s point of view. Multiple studies have shown that reading fiction can sharpen Theory of Mind, which is essentially the nuts and bolts of what we call empathy. The extent to which you understand that other people have different values, beliefs, and experiences from your own, and that these differences will obviously lead to their having different goals and using different methods to achieve those goals is Theory of Mind.Theory of Mind is demonstrated by one’s ability to tell what is happening in social situations, and even to discern someone’s emotional state just by looking at their eyes. Yes, more people doing reading of any kind would be a victory, but reading genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, fantasy) wasn’t shown to have the same impact on Theory of Mind as more difficult pieces of literary fiction. Shockingly, reading nonfiction shockingly affected almost no change in theory of mind or gross verbal abilities. When we slide in to the world of challenging fiction, we simulate new human experiences, and get a taste for how someone else thinks and feels. Great fiction wrests us by force from our own perspective and shows us another worldview that is so irresistibly real we can’t help but expand our own to accommodate it.
3. Literature Stands Tallest
Movies as a form of mass entertainment first got off the ground around the turn of the 20th century, inching slowly from silent minute-long novelties to feature length films with sound around the 1930s. TV dramas are about half as old, having first gripped America around the 1950s. Literature as an art form got a bit of a jump on these new fangled moving-pictures, with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey being composed around 700 BC with Babylonian and Egyptian literature springing up over a thousand years before that. And of course you’ll ask: who cares? What does it matter if one art form is older than another? It isn’t as though 3,000 years of literature are somehow impacting my reading of a book written in 2016.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace was written 130 years ago. It was widely received as a masterpiece at the time, and it was lauded across Russia and Europe. But then, so too were dozens of other authors whose names history forgot to write down. One writing style gave way to another and many who had been the rockstars of their day were openly mocked (Tears for Fears) or totally forgotten (Wham!) by generations that followed. The books we now deem great literature are those few works that never stopped affecting readers, which spoke to some universal of the human condition even as our daily reality grew further and further from the life of the author and their work. A writer in 2016 has the growing, living library of time defying art to find inspiration; they stand on the shoulders of these literary giants. These giants cast a long shadow, and to be considered great in 2016 a writer is gauged against a giant measuring stick.
TV and movies are still in their infancy as art forms, but that’s far from the only reason why they’re artistically so far behind literature. Making a movie costs a lot more than writing a novel. Funding a movie is a high stakes gamble and studios want to back a sure bet. This usually results in a movie that appeals to the broadest possible audience. Can formulaic, money grubbing appeals to the lowest common denominator also speak to the heart of our experience as humans? Generally no, though of course there are exceptions. This matters because — compared to literature — the pool of art to be inspired and challenged by is rendered that much smaller, as so much of Hollywood is built on the safe bet of rehashing of old ideas. That 6 of this year’s 8 best picture nominees and 6 of IMDB’s 10 best movies of all-time list are adaptations of books is telling. The artistic standards of writing literature are much, much more rigorous than the artistic standards of screenwriting and for that reason a huge chunk of Hollywood’s success every year is in screen adaptations of novels.
With all due respect to Mario Puzzo’s The Godfather and Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption (I enjoyed and will reread both), many of Hollywood’s great films are adaptations of genre fiction that are considered good but definitely not great writing. Screen adaptions of great literature have generally proven to be flaming piles of garbage, leaving many of the greatest gems of story-telling untold to the non-reading public. Instead of waiting for Hollywood’s next big screen adaptation go read it. The movie was good but the book was better. It always is.
4. You Complete the Circle
The car breaks down/ the power goes out/ somebody has already disappeared and the group decides their best chance of survival is to split up. The hot blonde thinks the guy in the letterman jacket is just a couple of feet over holy shit where is the guy in the letterman jacket?! She calls his name. Her voice echoes back to her. The scary music starts to seep in. She calls out, “Is anyone there?” “Of fucking course there is” the creepy music tells us as it grows louder. A hollow thud and a metallic clang from the darkness. She stumbles backward and finds her back against a wall. The music rises to a dreadful crescendo WHEN SUDDENLY that cooky over the top boss is going off on some super politically incorrect tangent, yet again. One of the disaffected office workers groans their offense at the zany boss-man, who in turn doubles down with something even crazier and more problematic than before! The blasé everyman makes eye contact with the camera, arching his eyebrows and sharing a knowing look with the audience.
TV and movies, sometimes even the good stuff, can be like a Disney ride. Where the story goes and how it affects you has, to the best of the producers’ ability, already been decided. The punch lines, the character arcs, the hard hitting low points and the happy ending have already been mapped out. The show’s creators have a pretty good idea of the age, gender, and education level of the viewing audience and they know just what buttons to push to get the emotional responses they want from their target demographic. They know what scares you, they know how to create a character you will connect with, they know how to make you feel. All that’s left to you is to passively enjoy the finished product as it’s presented.
The real power of literature is that it is not a finished product. The author makes for us a beautiful, but open circle. The words on the page are the prompt. The story unfolds in your mind, and you give it life. How did the Great Depression weigh on the Finches in that tired old Alabama town? What was it about Billy Pilgrim’s becoming unstuck in time that left us feeling that violence isn’t just wrong but kinda pathetic? Just how freakin lit was a party at Gatsby’s? The reason these families, these towns, and these settings remain as vivid as memories in our minds even years later is because we helped to create them. Great writing coaxes us into relationship with the text, where the unfinished circle is so compelling we can’t help but fill in the rest as best we can. We pour some bit of ourselves in to the text, emotionally investing without even realizing. We are left open to be entertained, to be enlightened, to be hurt by the story in ways that are, by definition, impossible while we are passive consumers of entertainment.
You don’t have to swing for the fences on day one. Start with something you read and actually enjoyed in high school and see if it doesn’t hit you even harder this time around. Try another book from the same author, or a similar author, or one that’s the total opposite. The only rule I care to follow is don’t stop challenging yourself.
