Why We Must Read Books

Books are vital in cultivating wisdom—not only for the truths they contain, but also for the way they help us think. In our distracted age, books give us perspective, focus, and space to reflect. Reading books—a wide variety, from different eras and places and worldviews, both fiction and nonfiction—keeps our anachronism and self-centeredness in check. They educate us, help us make connections across disciplines, and open up the world.
 
Books Help Us Connect, Explore, Think Well

When we read books, we are stepping into another’s shoes. We are entering the author’s world, giving our attention to the author’s perspective for an extended time. This last part is key. It’s hard to develop empathy when you only read a tweet by someone; but a book-length immersion in someone’s world creates the opportunity for understanding. The act of reading a book is literally the act of being “quick to listen, slow to speak.” In literary fiction, we develop empathy by getting inside characters’ minds. We may love or hate them, but to the extent that we listen to and live with them for a time, we can learn from the particularity of their existence. Research shows that literary fiction especially helps readers develop empathy—a better understanding of the complexity of what others are thinking and feeling.
We read to connect, but also to explore. Even though we technically read a book without ever physically going anywhere, we all know the feeling of how a book transports us to other places and other times.
 
There is a growing body of research that shows the powerful ways reading books—long, immersive reading in contrast to the fragmented, quick-scan reading we do online—strengthens our brains’ abilities to think well.
 
Books Confront the Noise
 
At a time when the glut, speed, and tailored-to-you nature of information is making us ever more prone to misinformation and unsound wisdom, reading books offers a powerful antidote. Books confront the “too much information” problem by focusing our attention on one thing for a longer, deeper time. They confront the “too fast” problem by forcing us to sit with one writer’s perspective for long enough to really grapple with it. Books challenge the “too focused on me” problem by putting us in another’s shoes.
 
Books give us solid grounding at a time when everything is up for grabs. They offer rubrics to better evaluate the barrage of information we face in today’s world. In a world of snapshots and soundbites, books offer fuller context, and as Andy Crouch writes, “generally speaking, the older the book, the deeper the context.”
 
Books Help us to Change
 
But reading is not merely a defensive act. To read and learn well we must also be teachable, willing to let our guard down enough to be impressionable (but not gullible). When we open a book we should be ready to be changed, open to being convinced, eager to learn something we didn’t know. If you think you know everything, you’ll have no use for books; if you are humble and curious (key foundations for a life of wisdom), you’ll devour them.
 
This is a key, yet countercultural, aspect of reading well. We live in a “death of expertise” world, after all. Our prevailing hermeneutic is suspicion. We are more comfortable proclaiming ourselves experts than we are being swayed or influenced by others. That’s why today’s discourse is at an impasse. We’ve so emphasized “you do you” liberty that expert knowledge, educated consensus, and logic no longer matter. It’s the problem educators face when they so emphasize students “learning to think for themselves” that the teacher’s own credentials and authority to adjudicate right and wrong answers loses any force.
 

Greatest Book

Still, we must put these books in their proper place. It would be folly to build one’s wisdom diet around great books but not also the greatest book, the Bible. Without the reference point of God, the “truth” of books is relative. One reader might find a book true, while another finds it false. There can be no consensus on canon if there is no transcendent reference point for words like good, true, and beautiful. “The only guarantor of communal truth is transcendent truth,” writes David Lyle Jeffrey. “Without intellectually accountable access to the Greater Book, very many lesser, yet still very great, expressions of truth may go without understanding.”
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021