Reading is social

“It’s a beautiful day today,” an older woman said as she sat on the bus seat next to me. It was two degrees Celsius. But the sun was out and it was British winter so she was right — it was a beautiful day.

When I told her what work I do, she was quite pleased. Working in publishing, I’ve learned, is a great conversation starter. The stranger on the bus went on to share her love for Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and I shared mine for Virginia Woolf. She told me about how she’s taking literature classes to keep her brain enlivened and I told her about what I studied as a literature student at university.

And so we went on, talking about books and their authors for the fifteen-minute bus ride into town.

Being a reader, so it’s been said, is an inherently solitary identity.

I spent much of my childhood beneath the bed covers, with only the pages in front of me as my company. It felt like the worlds I was reading about were made for me alone. But, at the same time, I spent many primary school lunch breaks, lounging across the library beanbags, reading books about sleepover clubs, undercover spies, and magical trees to my friends. The fictional worlds belonged to all of us then and we wandered around them together in glee.

Much of our reading might seem to play out only in the words and images that materialise in our minds. But much of the pleasure of reading comes about in the way the words on the page spark connections with the world and the people we share it with. Oftentimes, we find within the words written by someone living an entirely separate existence from our own the sentiments that we don’t know how to convey for ourselves.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

— James Baldwin

Reading is the reason a twenty-something-year-old South African can have a conversation with a sixty-something-year-old English stranger that was only interrupted by the bus’s last stop. Reading is the reason we can discover and strike up affinities across generations and geographies.

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