The Importance of Literature

Why do we read literature? What goes into our literary choices, those books we choose to pick up off of the shelf and dive into? Do we bring them down from the shelf to escape, for pure entertainment? Do we open them up to learn something new about the world around us? Do we turn the pages to learn something new about ourselves? Or, do we engage with them for other reasons? When I look at a bookshelf and select a book, I do so for a myriad of reasons. I look at aesthetics. I look at what the book can teach me about myself and the world. I look for entertainment. I look for the conversations the books open with other things in my life. Every book does not fit these criteria because some may provide more information than entertainment and vice versa, but this scale doesn’t make any book less valuable than any other work of literature.

Frank Yerby’s The Vixens taught me about Reconstruction in my home state of Louisiana and told me about the 1868 Bossier Massacre, which took place in my hometown and which was one of the bloodiest massacres during Reconstruction. Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio led me to learn about Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Commission which helped 2,000–4,000 refugees escape the Nazis in the south of France. Orringer led me to Anna Seghers’ and Victor Serge’s novels on the same period and their own fictionalized retellings of their flight from Nazi pursuit. Leïla…