Why You Should Read

Just one of my "Unread Books" stacks.

You should be able to experience finishing the very last word of the very last sentence on the very last page of a really good book, knowing that the only thing you could do is put it down and hope to God that the next book you read is just as compelling, just as riveting, just as life-changing. In fact, you should be able to realize, first and foremost, that a good book can change your life; make you more cynical, make you more hopeful, make you more discerning, make you better, make you worse. You should be able to walk into a bookshop, and feel like you've come home. You should be able to stare at rows of shelves of beautiful hardbound books and fresh paperbacks, and feel the sadness that comes with the impossibility of knowing all of them, of being able to curl up in bed with each and every one of them, to wake up with your forehead pressed upon page 127 because you've fallen asleep reading. You should be able to know the pain of staring longingly from your work-desk at a stack of unread books; you should know the burden of waiting for the summer so that you can read them all, between long sips of lemonade, with the sand between your toes, and you couldn't be bothered to go into the water because you've drowned in a sea of words.

You should be able to unapologetically want things that you could have only heard of from a good book, to want the kind of love or excitement or fantasy that is true only of fiction, to need to take part in conversations that could only have come from the mind of a Bronte sister, to walk into situations that lead to tension that could only have come from Hemingway, to revolutions that only Flaubert could properly distance you from. You should be able to meet people and say that they truly are 'effervescent' or 'pulchritudinous' or 'impossible'; you should be able to meet people and say, with conviction, that they truly are beautiful.

You should take these books, properly and without regrets, distracted from real life; perhaps reading Garcia-Marquez, speeding on a railway in Tokyo, or Palahniuk, while seasick on a cruise ship to Santorini, or Calvino, in bed, wishing you were elsewhere. You should find that there are certain books that demand every available pocket of time, and certain books that you will force yourself to finish but will enjoy, regardless. You should find that there are books that you would force yourself to finish in a night, and books that will prove too painful to finish. There are books that leave an impression for days, and some that never really leave you; some of these, you'll wish you'd never read. You should be able to experience firsthand what being haunted really is, to see for yourself where dread is sown deep inside you, to know for sure the key differences among the words 'happiness', 'bliss', and 'delight', to find within yourself that your capacity to feel and think is bigger than you could have ever imagined, or could even have ever wanted.

Maybe the phrase isn't "should read". Should devour, maybe? You should be insatiable; you should devour these fairytales and romances, these mysteries, the fiction, the non-fiction, the semi-autobiographical, everything you could get your hands on. You should eat up all the poetry you could find, tear them into pieces, until they're raw again, barely couplets, barely meters. You should spit out the bare bones of a novel, and feel every feeling in the world at once, whether these feelings have names or not. You should take these points of comparison between what the world is, and what the world could be.