Not a sports page, not a magazine, but a book

By Brian Reinhart     8/28/08 7:00pm

Summer is a time of endless possibilities. Everyone I know found a different way to stay busy after school ended, and a way to stay entertained away from work. Some of my friends watched television or held movie marathons; everybody went to see The Dark Knight. We argued about Heath Ledger and worshipped Michael Phelps. A couple of people I know even read books.Not many, of course. Reading is a lost art, a means of entertainment going extinct in the electronic age. The average American reads something like four books a year, all of them written by Stephenie Meyer. A quick search of the Thresher online archives reveals a grand total of one book review. In other words, the number of book reviews ever published by the Thresher is probably lower than the number of freshmen who didn't even open this year's summer reading.

I decided to buck the trend. I decided to avoid the boredom and loneliness of summer by plunging myself into an ocean of the printed word. On the day summer break ended, I finished book number 41.

Now that my long and wordy quest is over, I can ask and answer a lot of questions about reading. Some are serious: Why do we read? What benefit do we derive from looking at the words other people put together? How can it be that blobs of ink have the power to transport us and teach us? Some of the questions are even more serious: Am I going crazy?

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This summer, I read for many different reasons. I read some books for pure pleasure, including novels by Kinky Friedman, a Jewish cowboy, Texan politician and musician who writes murder mysteries. I read some works in order to learn, and thus can now tell you from author Bill Bryson that breakfast cereal was invented at an insane asylum to keep the patients timid and docile. Other books were on my list to depress me, some to make me think, quite a few to make me laugh.

Many people appreciate this ability of reading to inspire in us feelings of pleasure and pathos, but there are other reasons we keep turning the pages. Books can inspire conversations. That is the idea behind Rice's common reading, at least, and to a surprising degree it is true. I even had a brief e-mail correspondence with one author, A.J. Jacobs, after reading his essay about the time he stoned an adulterer in accordance with Biblical law.

Books are works of mutual imagination. A movie is awe-inspiring because of the world it creates and the inventiveness of its actors, writers and producers. A good novel or travelogue inspires because it demands that inventiveness of both writer and reader. A well-told story takes shape not in the words of the storyteller but in the mind of the listener.

Books can be companions. Sometimes it is difficult not to imagine the characters jumping off the page and into real life. And the author is always there to console us or tease us, to rebuke or to reassure. As Groucho Marx once said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

All of this doesn't exactly explain why I read 41 books over the summer. I had a compulsive desire to turn more pages, partly because by doing so I could transport myself out of my tiny, dull Texas town and into centuries past, fictional worlds or the frontiers of modern science and psychology. Partly, I simply wanted to learn, laugh, cry, smile and be engaged by the written thoughts of great minds.

There is, though, another reason we read, which we probably don't talk about as much as we should. It might have something to do with my bizarre quest this summer, too. We read books to learn about ourselves. At first the concept may seem odd; shouldn't we be writing our own books to figure that out? I am not so sure. To browse the pages a fellow human has written is to enter that person's soul, to look around and, while gazing upon the thoughts and feelings of another, to search for shadows of ourselves.

The search is never easy, of course. Often it can be very dark inside the soul of a writer, or in the mind of a struggling artist. It's almost like being inside of a dog.

Brian Reinhart is a sophomore at Wiess College.

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