We read for information, recreation, inspiration, and instruction. We read both to be lifted out of and to be taken deeply into ourselves. We learn life lessons from our reading, whether these are explicitly intended by the author, or derived by implication from the course of events related. If what we read is truly good, and if we read widely and critically, we make ourselves, ultimately, better people. The “great instrument of moral good,” said the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “is the imagination.” To be “greatly good,” he argued, one must “imagine intensely and comprehensively” by putting oneself “in the place of another and of many others.” Imaginative fiction requires the thoughtful reader to do precisely this. By identifying ourselves sympathetically with the lives and circumstances of the people described in the books we read, we can combat prejudice, open closed minds and hearts, and thereby increase our understanding of the human condition, while clarifying for ourselves our place in human society. George Eliot’s aim, she herself said, was “directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgement, pity, and sympathy.” Her nuanced characterization of the flawed but very human Rev. Casaubon in her masterpiece Middlemarch is merely one instance of her skill in putting theory into practice.
At the same time, there are other practical benefits to reading. Without intending to, we improve our vocabulary and sentence structure as we are beguiled by story. The writer Jane Gardam remembers how she, as a four-year-old, explained to her mother the meaning of the word ‘soporific’ in a Beatrix Potter story about rabbits. She had worked out its meaning from its context. We simply express ourselves better if we read, especially if we begin the process early. Two further examples of this should suffice. In grade eight, my son Adrian wrote this sentence in a composition on Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf: “While Mowat was in the den, he realized that the wolf was not the bloodthirsty savage killer which it had been portrayed to be, for if it were to be as described, it could easily have attacked Mowat when he was inside the den, alone and exposed, with no weaponry whatsoever.” The perfect balance of this beautiful compound-complex sentence by a twelve-year-old, with its sophisticated use of tenses and correct use of the old-fashioned but perfectly acceptable word ‘weaponry’, could only have come from his reading, a fact I pointed out when his teacher accused him unjustly of plagiarism. She was quick to apologize. Years later, my two-year-old granddaughter Marlowe, out on a walk with her parents at the time, was troubled by the sight of a house on the next block undergoing renovations. “There’s just one problem with that house,” she portentously declared. “It has no windows.” We were all puzzled by the source of her mature choice of words, so unlike the prattle of a typical two-year-old, until I discovered it in reading her favourite bedtime story, Cinderella, aloud to her. The fairy godmother, in preparing Cinderella for the ball she would otherwise have missed, warns her, “There’s just one problem with our plan: you must leave the ball before the stroke of midnight…”
