Why Do We Read?
I recently participated in the “Digital Publishing Virtual Summit,” a virtual conference, meaning a conference where you listen to the speakers through your computer speakers, and type your questions to be answered at the end, hopefully.
It was overall a very good experience, even though I didn’t quite agree with a few ideas I heard. One of them was the notion that people read to either escape or avoid pain. That concept baffled me. It may be partially truth, but I can’t agree that it’s universal. The speaker, Mr. Jim Edwards said, people read fiction to scape pain, and nonfiction to avoid pain.
The presenter goes on saying that when reading fiction we want to forget our reality. And we read nonfiction to make money, save money, save time, avoid effort, be successful, be popular, feel love, and find social success. Certainly I’ll read a book to learn a better way to do my job, or to help me get better organized, but I’d rather see it in a positive perspective.
I read for sheer pleasure.
I believe we read fiction for pleasure, and nonfiction to learn and to stay current. A recent research by Pew Internet, with 2,986 respondents age 16 and older, narrowed the main reasons why we read to four: pleasure; to keep up with current events; to research on specific topics that interest us; and for work or school.
| The basic reasons why people read
Americans cite a variety of motives for their reading, especially when it comes to long-form content like books or magazine articles. It is sometimes the case that different people cite different motives. Generally, better educated Americans who have gone to at least some college and better off Americans who live in households earning over $50,000 are more likely than the less educated and Americans living in poorer households to read for all the reasons we queried:
Men (58%) are more likely than women (53%) to say they read for work or school-related reasons. Those under age 65 are considerably more likely to cite this reason, compared with seniors. This, too, is partly tied to the fact that proportionally fewer senior citizens are in the workforce. And parents (68%) are more likely than non-parents (48%) to say they read for this reason. You can read more about this research clicking here. |
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1947 for "All The King's Men"
Considering nonfiction I found the data above quite explicit and satisfying, for fiction though I’ll stick with the words of Robert Penn Warren. In his essay for the “Saturday Evening Post Society” in 1986 “Why do we read fiction?” he says, “Why do we read fiction? The answer is simple. We read it because we like it. And we like it because fiction, as an image of life, stimulates and gratifies our interest in life. But whatever interests may be appealed to by fiction, the special and immediate interest that takes us to fiction is always our interest in a story.”
And he touches the very core of the pleasure I find in fiction when he says, “fiction, too, gives us that heightened awareness of life, with all the fresh, uninhibited opportunity to vent the rich emotional charge–tears, laughter, tenderness, sympathy, hate, love, and irony–that is stored up in us and short-circuited in the drowse of the accustomed. Furthermore, this heightened awareness can be more fully relished now, because what in actuality would be the threat of the problematic is here tamed to mere imagination, and because some kind of resolution of the problem is, owing to the very nature of fiction, promised.”
The Barnes and Noble Book Club Community Room posted a couple of years ago this really cool video called “Why Do We Read?” and I could relate to all the answers, and none mentioned escaping or avoiding pain.