Is Reading A Lost (and Valuable) Art?

A few days ago, I was talking with a colleague and at one point he turned our conversation to the topic of reading. He mentioned a management book he thinks highly of but then admitted he has never been a big reader and often relies on audio books to pick up new ideas. As a regular listener of recorded books myself, I had no problem with his “confession” but it got me reflecting about my own reading habits and what they had done for me.

Growing up, we lived in the country and that translated to hours and hours on the bus pretty much up through high school (I can remember getting on the bus as early as 6:45 one year). In the days before cell phones and mobile games, it’s not hard to understand why reading became a way to pass the time.

This was compounded at home as we lived too far out to get cable and satellite service at the time was both very expensive and not very good. So, if we weren’t outside doing something, I’d often have my nose in a book.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to come across as this committed, intellectual, highly-read child. I complained bitterly and often about how unfair my life was and how my classmates would talk about all these shows and movies they saw that I had no clue about. (Ah, the righteous indignation of youth). But there wasn’t much to be done about it and I found that books provided a reliable source of entertainment and diversion. I think my love of reading was born as much out of necessity than anything else.

My tastes tended to skew more towards fiction and entertainment over literature, science and other scholarly topics. Still, my friend’s comments about audio books really made me pause about the value of regularly picking up a physical book and I started to reflect on how this “enforced” reading of my youth turned out to be a powerful tool for the person I’ve become.

Yes, I was exposed to new ideas and my creativity was certainly stoked by what I read. But what I started to reflect on was more the mechanics of language, about how my vocabulary was stretched and my ability to write improved because of all I’d read. While you certainly can get some of that from audio books or even TV and movies, the mental exercise of seeing words on the page – or now the screen – and then translating them into something meaningful turned out to be a great asset to my adult self.

Don’t get me wrong. I could never teach an English class or explain all the rules of sentence structure. But I have a pretty strong sense of how to string together words into a coherent flow and I’m reasonably good at getting punctuation and grammar correct. And that’s almost entirely due to my exposure to hundreds of thousands of pages of text throughout my life. By reading countless pages, I learned how to write, spell and ultimately communicate better.

As I continue to ponder my friend’s admission to relying solely on audio books for his “reading,” I find no fault in his doing so as he is still learning and expanding his mind. But for those who can make the time, I would argue that picking up a book (or an e-reader or even reading a blog) is good for us in so many other ways. We learn not just what the author is trying to convey, but we also pick up how they did so. And, in turn, we enrich our own ability to communicate. Add to that the often richer stories that books can convey over an hour or two of something filmed and the benefits keep adding up.

Not a bad deal if you ask me.

Thanks for reading this… and know that I’m pulling for you!