I get it, your teacher assigns another book to read. Some of you are excited to dig in, but I am not talking to “Those People.”

I am talking to these people:

You know who you are.

I feel like somewhere along the way reading became a chore and not a joy. Maybe it was the endless book reports assigned to you and then as you got older, literature analysis(LA), which is a nice way of saying “pick it apart until all the fun gets sucked out.” For all you English majors, don’t get offended, LA has its place…somewhere.  For the rest of us that just want to read a book and enjoy it, we need to begin to read what interests us and build from there. One book has a funny way of leading to another.

Here is the sad truth: many college graduates rarely pick up a book the rest of their lives, I just am not good with that. 

So let me try to explain the “Why” of literature. Lets do it in list form, because, lists are fun. 

Here we go: 10 Reasons to read literature:

It saves you time – you get to experience a multitude of emotions and situations you will never get to experience in your lifetime. Its like adding years of experience to your life! Think of it as a reality simulator.

It prepares you for life’s trials – Would it not be a huge advantage when life smacked you in the head and you were able to think back to how people reacted in similar situations and it informed you on how (or how not) to respond? Another word for that would be wisdom.

Literature builds empathy – Hmmm, let me think how this could come in handy, oh yeah, dealing with people. You MIGHT have to do that every day- of your life-unless you are a hermit. This is how you build those “soft skills” everyone wants to have on their resume.

It teaches you about yourself. When you read about characters in a story or in history, you can compare them to yourself and how you are like them, or totally unlike them. You can see yourself in a situation or a personality and it is a bit of a mirror to your soul. We can all behave a bit nasty and it is a good thing to stand in front of that mirror and examine yourself. Or, you could just have kids and they will do that for you.

Reading is good for your brain. It activated and links up your brain cells and literally reshapes the brain, in a good way. These links remain active for days after reading. its like a workout for your gray matter.

Literature sends us on a vacation to cultures and other worlds totally different than our own. It expands our worldview and gets us out of our little bubble to see the differences that are informed by culture and the similarities that come from our shared humanity. 

Humanity. Period. What are humans like? How do they think, react, reason, feel. How else do you learn what it means to be human? How do I guage how people are going to act and react?

Reading changes you. It makes you feel deeply and look inside yourself deeply and find inspiration for heroic acts. Think of Sydney Carton sacrificing his life from Dickens “A Tale of Two Cities”. It makes you laugh, cry, feel anger, shame, and indignation and all the host of human emotions. It makes you feel alive.

It builds your language skills. It increases our reading comprehension and our reading speed. It builds our vocabulary and is the basis of our ability to write grammatically sophisticated and expressive sentences. Words good.

Last but not least,

It teaches you that failure is a good thing. It is actually not a horrible, final defeat but just a necessary stepping stone to wisdom. One of the lies we humans tell ourselves is not to try something crazy for fear of failure, but as we read history and literature we see clearly that it is those who are not afraid to fail who do the greatest things. They may fail multiple times and still keep trying and that is what causes them to step out of the mundane and ordinary and change the world. Think of Edison or Lincoln and the dogged determination they displayed. Fail often! 

Let me leave you with this thought from Rea Berg of Beautiful Feet Books

” Consider how often Jesus used stories to teach moral lessons. His stories were never dry, dull or boring. Rather they captured his listeners by their pure simplicity, their inherent truth, and their clear applicability to everyone’s lives. All great literature has these same inherent qualities.”

Pick up a book, get a book recommendation from friend and start your own reading journey, NO BOOK REPORTS REQUIRED!