As the owner of a bookstore, I sometimes find myself forced to defend the value of enterprise—what I like to call the “bookish enterprise.”
“How’s it going?” I’m asked by a skeptic, usually a man, almost never an actual buying customer. “You going to survive?”
“Seems like a risky thing you’re doing here, what with Amazon.” I hear that one all the time.
This too: “E-books are so prevalent, do people even read regular books anymore?”
“The internet’s got so much information, I just don’t know if it is worth spending twenty-eight bucks on something that’s just going to sit on the shelf anyway,” confesses another, revealing his priorities.
“I don’t know, man, I really just don’t have the time to read. Feels like most people feel that way now. But good luck. I hope it works out for you.”
Gee, thanks mister.
I am fascinated by these comments not because they are spoken by people who clearly do not read or care about books as artifacts—this is not a new problem—but because of what they implicitly seem to suggest books are for. Books, they seem to argue, are just about information and data and today I can get it much more efficiently, at less cost, than a book offers.
It seems likely that these same people value rest and leisure only inasmuch as it offers personal growth or self-improvement. These are the people Oliver Burkeman describes in his book, Four Thousand Weeks, who cannot enjoy “a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.”
This perspective emerged over the last few centuries for a variety of reasons, many of which are certainly related to the Industrial Revolution, and they have been studied at length in many books, but our contemporary fixation with productivity (and self-help) has caused us, too often, to be blind to the reality that, as Karen Swallow Prior puts it in On Reading Well, “we first make sense of the world aesthetically.” Or as James K. A. Smith puts it (and KSP quotes), “our hearts traffic in stories.” This, of course, is why “literature has a particular power in forming our vision of the good life.”
I suspect the cynics who come into my shop and wave whole thing off as fanciful, would stare at me (or smirk) were I too pull out my commonplace and rattle off quotes such as these. They would be downright stunned at a sentence like this, from Simone de Beauvoir, which Burkeman includes in Four Thousand Words:
“If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing then production and wealth are only hollow myths: they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in an individual and living joy.”
After reading this I wondered if the image of an old man, satisfied by the wonder of a glass of wine, can be applied to books, too. What if I simple swapped out “wine” for “a book” (or, better yet, added a book to the scene)?
And if I do swap it out, what does it mean to be satisfied by a book? Analogically speaking, can I be satisfied by a book in the way that I can be by a glass of wine? Can an individual and living joy be experienced by a reader as by a sipper?
Several weeks ago, I jumped on Twitter and on the CR Facebook group and asked people to share why they read. I received answers much like the following:
Escapism
To learn something
To discover new perspectives
Find a good story
Engage the imagination
Increase empathy
To learn the difference between good and evil (This is from On Reading Well)
To build a habit of virtue (so is this)
To become a better writer
While thinking about this list, I began to contemplate the idea of “reading for its own sake,” as opposed to reading with a particular productive end in mind. So, I tried to sort them into categories that for the sake of the exercise I called “productivity” and “joy.” But it is probably not surprising that I seemed to be creating a false dichotomy. After all, you can find a lot of joy in discovering a new perspective or in exercising the critical thinking muscle, just as escapism can be viewed as a bit utilitarian. And should we really view “learning the difference between good and evil” as either?
But perhaps that is the whole point. Yes, books can be a tonic for what ails our age, but that has always been true. Book have been the tonic for every age since the invention of the printing press (or, if you’re willing to be generous in your definitions, in every age). This is true precisely because they defy the easy categorization I sought. Books are magic because the hard work of transformation can be accomplished simply by paying attention to the right things, because through them transformation can actually be joyous, because through them we are able to glimpse a “more capacious vision of the possible.”
It can be hard to make space for books—in our days and in our budgets. Both are limited (as Burkeman explores eloquently in Four Thousand Weeks). And, yes, the internet is indeed full of so many things. Sure, Amazon and what not. But I am confident in what we’re doing because each cover opened is like a cork popped, each page turned is like a sip taken, full of individual and living joy.
Our doors will close one day. Ideally long after I am dead. This podcast will end eventually. Hopefully many, many years from now. But as long as we are here, we are going to work to set the table for a great feast—for a great savoring, if you will.
You do the same in your own way. We’ll share tasting notes.
Gonna go deep into the CR archives for this one but one of the things I was reminded of while reading this was a particularly striking thing your dad said way back on one of the Much Ado About Nothing episodes on TPTT (I think). He was talking about Latin and the vernacular and that Latin was a higher form of language. If you know Latin you can ascend to those heights when needed and can go back down when needed, but if you don't know it, you don't have that option because your brain isn't configured in that way. This rung especially true to me as someone who studied Greek in college—it really does rewire your brain. You really can see how Greece was the birthplace of philosophy just from how the syntax is set up.
But enough linguistics, my point is that I read, and I'm assuming I'm not alone in a vibrant community like this, to enjoy a great story but also a truly good book has you marveling at the writer's skill, especially when they're so skilled it seems effortless. Reading a master like Tolstoy, Garcia-Marquez, Vergil etc not only gives you a great story but has the rewarding, and dare I say productive, side effect of opening up your mind in ways it hadn't been. What those dismissive people you're referring to, and we all know some, really mean is that you don't get a certificate on LinkedIn when you finish East of Eden; you can't put it on a resume like if it were a text book teaching you Python. Yet reading has spillover effects to other parts of life too that shouldn't be discounted even if intangible. Besides booklovers are of course happier, wiser, more fulfilled people (I kid, well, sort of).
As someone who works in finance, you can sometimes see how narrow some people's minds are who just read earnings reports and consultant slide decks, or people who *only* watch sports or reality tv (or still worse cable news) and their lives revolve around celebrities. Those are great too, or can be, but people need the variety and depth books are uniquely suited to provide too. Of course, some media is best suited for specific things too. Like I love football and I love books but if you turned even a Chiefs-Bills game into a book it would be terrible. You need the visual and the atmosphere. Same way many classics do not translate to the big screen well. Anyway, this was a way too long way of saying that those who close-mindedly reject books do so at their peril and close off a lane that is both enjoyable and rewarding.
David, this is fantastic! ♥️ So glad you & Bethany took a chance on a bookshop. Cheers to what they do in our lives! 🥂