To Read Is to Think

And thinking might lead to . . .

“Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”  ~ John Locke

Years ago when I first started teaching English composition to incoming college freshmen (and seniors who managed to put it off for 4 years), I was so absorbed by the thrill and the challenge of teaching that everything in my world became worthy of possible classroom discussion. I remember standing in line in a grocery store looking at the covers of magazines and forming questions for my students. (If you can’t help them think, you can’t help them write.) Now everything in my life seems to be about reading—or in my case, not reading. I have stacks of books all over the  house—unread books, books I heard about on a podcast (a good one for thinking is Hidden Brain) or read about in the Guardian newsletter. Lately my thoughts turn more and more to talking about books, writing about reading here in this newsletter, exchanging ideas. And maybe something will spark, and I’ll once again find joy in reading.

I’ve said before in a post that seemed to have nothing to do with books or reading that for me, everything is about books and reading. So to not be reading much right now stumps me. It’s like teaching students to write . . . 

Here’s a story: Years ago I was teaching at a local community college, and one night I could see that the two sisters at the back of the room were not happy about something. Sure enough, after class they approached me to complain about the subject matter of the discussions. “We took this class to learn how to write, and you’re teaching us how to think. We’re going to complain to the department chair.” And they stomped out as I called to their backs, “Please do!”

So this business about reading: I’ll ask a question I’ve asked here before: Why do we do it? Or another way to look at this: What do we get out of reading? (To ask “why” is to assign agency, choice, and to ask “what” is to look at results.) We may choose to read for escape or entertainment, to learn something specific—like a friend who reads about a place that she will be traveling to—but we can’t be sure what—if anything—we will get out of choosing a specific book—right? Or out of the very act of reading. I think this is an important point: We don’t know how a book will affect us, challenge us, change us—until after we have read, maybe long after. 

I love this line from Gregory Maguire’s A Lion Among Men, and I think of it now because reading could be the culprit:

“Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying. Who knows when memory, unbidden, will burst out and take hostages?”

When I first started teaching, I learned very quickly that students were reluctant to take a stand, form an opinion, and in some cases wouldn’t recognize on opinion if it bit them on the butt. But to write an argumentative essay—which was the goal of that first semester English Comp course—you had to be able to take a position and defend it, which also meant understanding the position you’re defending against. At the heart of any English Comp class? Critical thinking. Are we critical readers? Does reading lead us to thinking lead us to forming our own opinions, which may or may not be counter to the ideas about the world we grew up with. Reading = danger, maybe? (More about this later. Banned Books Week starts tomorrow.)

We all come to be readers from different directions at different ages, and then here we are: readers among a whole community of readers. Something leads us to a book—the subject, a friend’s recommendation, the cover art (seriously, I am guilty of this), but in my experience, what I’m left with at the end of the book may have satisfied the itch that led me to the book in the first place, but it almost always leads me off in other directions as well—even one of the mysteries I’ve been devouring. Just as learning to write a college essay requires thinking, and therefore takes us off in directions those sisters, for example, didn’t want to go, so reading a book is—can be, depending on the book—a leap of faith, a mine field, a connection to something we can’t quite put our finger on. Who knows? But we’re drawn, and there is just no point in questioning that. We reach a place in our reading lives—and I could leave off the modifier here and just say “lives”—when everything we do is a leap of faith.

That brings me back around to the very personal: I don’t know—with my brain—why it is so hard for me to get absorbed in a book right now, and I could make up a bunch of stories to answer “why?” but my heart suspects I am afraid of that leap, of what might “burst out,” and since everything in life is connected to everything else—I do believe that and can make a case for it—then the best I can do is to understand that grief brought me to this not-reading-much place, and because I am a reader and have passed this way before—in books and in life—I trust that this too shall pass.

“Once open the books, you have to face the underside of everything you’ve loved . . . 
~ Adrienne Rich, Love Poems V