Revive the Book: The Importance of Pleasure Reading in College

Shannon West / Gavel Media

The Importance of Pleasure Reading in College

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By Nicholas Reed / Gavel Media Staff Design by Helen Formoso-Murias / Staff Designer

Books became miserable a few minutes after I learned what an analytical essay was. The five-paragraph essay was the judge, the jury and the executioner of my interest in reading. Leave it to high school to turn literature into a soulless activity. I lost my interest in reading for pleasure and it wasn’t until this year, as a sophomore in college, that I found it again. Retrospectively, I don’t know what I did without it.

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A single excerpt from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s book Several Short a text on your own terms. Whether you

Sentences About Writing changed my perspective on reading. He wrote, “Prose isn’t validated by terminal meaning.” If what he says is true — which it is — the very foundation of my high school English education was fraudulent. If there is one thing I learned from English class, it was that every book had a magical “point,” which I was expected to understand and then formulate into a tidy and highly structured analytical essay.

The teacher provided the “point,” begging the question: why read the book at all? Everything you needed was conveniently provided by the Sparknotes introduction. Needless to say, there were a few times when I didn’t read. High school made reading a chore, a sadistic and miserable hunt for significance with little attention paid to the merit of the work as a whole.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can enjoy and appreciate a great book

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without having to know the “point.” You can take many important things from a book and apply them to the world without having to establish a terminal meaning. If the book is well written, it will speak to you. Reading can be fun.

What is pleasure reading? It’s a vague term, thrown around by parents and teachers, often meant to encourage learning outside of the classroom and foster development, which makes it sound terrible. In truth, it is encountering

choose Harry Potter or Infinite Jest is up to you. Pleasure reading is about enjoying the artistry and diction of a work of literature. It is reading great books because they are great, not to extract some arbitrary meaning.

It does not need to be a critically acclaimed book. “Junk” pleasure reading can be just as useful and enjoyable; although I would encourage everybody to vary the caliber of texts they choose.

Pleasure reading is not reserved for only prose. There are countless other mediums of writing that are interesting and worth reading.

The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and even Interview Magazine have great content regularly, and many of them are short enough to occupy a few minutes of free time in between meetings or classes. In the ever-sowonderful 21st century, the Internet puts access to them at our fingertips.

December 2014

David Foster Wallace is renowned for his fiction writing, but his nonfiction also deserves to be mentioned. His essay collection Consider the Lobster is brilliant, and its amalgam of topics allows you to explore different interests each time. These essays are a lot shorter than most books, making them manageable during our busy schedules.

It’s an accepted fact that we as BC students have a lot of work. There are many late nights and early mornings, all intensified by countless reading assignments. Quite often, the assigned reading isn’t completed, so how could anyone have time for pleasure reading?

The bigger question is why spend the free time I do have reading? Netflix is a lot easier, social media is ostensibly more entertaining and there are unlimited corners of the Internet to explore.

The hackneyed argument is that all of this “screen time” hurts our brains and eyes. While this very well may be

true, the argument ignores the massive social importance of social media and other digital communication. Too much screen time is certainly bad, although a health-based argument may not be the strongest way to defend that.

The real issue with these digital diversions is that they trap us in a fabricated world. When we have thousands of Facebook friends and Instagram followers, and even our Spotify habits are broadcast to the world, it becomes impossible to be true to yourself. You cannot be anyone if you are trying to be everyone.

Reading is one of the few activities in our hyper-connected 21st century that allows this. When you sit down and read for no reason at all, there is an unmediated relationship with the text that allows you to engage on the most personal level. Better yet, save for a public emotional outburst (read: bawling your eyes out), how you feel while

reading does not need to be shared with anyone. It is this deeply personal experience that allows us to grow as humans, and to explore what we want to do with our life. Even Netflix, which you can certainly partake in alone, does not allow such an experience.

To the latter point, I will say that I am a self-aware Netflix binger (all nine seasons of The Office in two months). But I’m also a regular reader. There is most certainly room for both, although I don’t recommend the aforementioned foray to anyone. Pleasure reading is important for a lot of reasons, but in the end you have to do it for yourself. It is an escape we all need from the mass amounts of information and emotions we process and compartmentalize every single day.

A place that allows you to understand your life on its own terms is invaluable.

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