“We must return to the love of the book”
“Few persons these days could be considered bookish, let alone those in the pews on Sunday.”
As Jessica Hooten Wilson has it, “the greatest hindrance to a reading life has been screens. […] [T]his technology has caused tribalism, has increased ignorance and conspiracy theories, and may be threatening democracy.” Give folks Google, she adds, and “they feel intelligent”.
In her 2023 book, Reading for the Love of God, she—someone who, as her publisher puts it, “speaks around the world on [such] topics as…Christian ways of reading”—contends that “watching Netflix or YouTube is so much easier than reading a book.” But “never lead them [the viewers] to love wisdom,” she chides, “or consider their role in society. Never let them read books that encourage real thinking.”
But then Wilson declares her true feelings: “Against the seduction of screens, we must return to the love of the book.”
Don’t hold your breath: “After all, the average American today”—here she references 2022 stats from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—”reads fewer than 20 minutes each day, in comparison to hours streaming,…scanning social media, or just being entertained by their phones, computers, and televisions.”
She’s hardly alone in her unease. In a letter she penned way back in 1996—this, Wilson points up in her book—Susan Sontag, the writer, philosopher, and political activist, “prophesies that this forthcoming technology will threaten what reading should be. […] These developments mean, in her words, ’nothing less than the death of inwardness, and of the book.’” As a result, Sontag “laments that ‘books are now considered an endangered species.’”
What reading should be is what Wilson’s book is all about. That she would be its author is evident: she is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. “This unique, interdisciplinary colloquium introduces undergraduate students to the best writers and literary texts throughout history,” the university affirms. A private research post-secondary school near Malibu, California, Pepperdine is affiliated with the Churches of Christ.
An alumna, Wilson began serving the school in 2022 as its inaugural visiting scholar of liberal arts. Upon assuming her new post last summer, she remarked, “Pepperdine’s Great Books program gives me such hope for the future. Here’s a community where people are loving and living the tradition. It’s where my mind and heart first awakened” to great literature. The school has high hopes for her: “In returning to this storied program in a leadership role, Wilson hopes to further its tradition of producing students with astute critical thinking skills.”
It’s what she wants for us all. Voila, Reading for the Love of God…which is not only amongst the SSUC Library’s holdings, but was a Featured Book earlier this year. In it, Wilson tells how and why to read at all. Both biddings will be reviewed here and now, beginning with “how”.
We should start off by acknowledging that, when it comes to reading, we…some of us, at least…aren’t as good as we could be: “Too few people can read well,” Wilson laments. “We cannot accurately decipher words within contexts, follow complex sentences, or attend to the details of a passage or poem.”
To boot, “We all bring baggage to our reading….” She urges, “You must remove your biases and expectations. […] We have to admit what our prejudices are, examine on what they are based, and then set them aside….”
Rather than prejudge the writing, the reader “should approach the book…with a willingness to learn, to receive, from the book.” Indeed, “we could exhibit our appreciation for the gift of books by reading them with charity.”
Openness can have its rewards: “[I]f we assume a text is full of errors prior to reading it, we will probably find all the fallacies we had thought were there all along. But if we begin by assuming a piece of writing is good, we may discover…an unexpected trove of wisdom.” Here she quotes C. S. Lewis from his book, An Experiment in Criticism, “‘The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.’”
Reading is a serious undertaking, Wilson posits: “[T]he practice of reading is a responsibility.” She insists that “reading demands engagement. It asks something of the participant.” Pay heed.
As well, Wilson proffers more down-to-earth counsel, such as this: write in the margins, for this will strengthen your relationship to the book: “The conversation morphs from a monologue into a dialogue. […] These notes remind us that books are conversations between the author and the reader.”
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“Scribbled in the margins”
“My passion is used bookshops,” the writer of a letter to the editor of The Globe and Mail, declares, “where I can spend hours with well-thumbed old books”; his brief missive appeared in the newspaper this May 4. “The more disorganized and scruffy the shop, the greater the pleasure of finding that long out-of-print book. Used books often come with history,” he added. “Reading the comments scribbled in the margins by previous readers is like a book-club discussion from another time and place.”
When your librarians took on their assignment, they wondered of SSUC’s ministers, Nancy Steeves and Chris New, whether it would be acceptable to donate books they themselves had read. They worried, because they were in the habit of annotating what they read, of underscoring those notions that had spoken to them. By all means!, the clerics responded. Those valuations and highlighted passages, they reasoned, will give new readers that much more to ponder, to swallow, to dispute. Which is to say, you should borrow the books, and read ‘em…please do…and feel free to scrawl in them your own thoughts: rally to or repulse what you will!
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Too, she would have readers, in choosing a book, be bold: “I’m a firm believer in reading works that challenge our assumptions and pull off the snuggly blanket.” Read out loud—this is another exhortation: “[W]ords signify meaning, and we feel their weight and height more profoundly when we orally express and audibly receive them.” And do give books a second look—she urges “repeated reading and engagement”: “The best books are those that demand rereading.”
These, then, are ways meant to show us how to read better. But why should we read at all? Wilson takes up this matter, as well. And resolves it in two words: “Readers seek” [her emphasis].
Mind you, she, with commitment and eloquence, touches on this aim multiple times throughout her book, from start to finish: in her conclusion, she warrants, “Opening a book should not be the final goal, but the invitation to a broader vision.” Read because our own experience is limited: “[O]ur eyes are not enough by which to see. The time and place in which we live blinds us to other perspectives and ways of being that are not our own experience.” Reading can “cultivate understanding of…other times and places, other griefs or joys….”
If people are unable or unwilling to read, they’re cumbered to “see outside of their experience of the world,” she writes. “Reading empowers people to think, to change their situation and that of others, and to not be manipulated by those who seek to control them.” If we do not recognize “the complexity of existence,” then “we reduce our vision. We limit our way of seeing to only what is on the surface or in the present or immediately useful.”
Caleb Bingham said as much in The Columbian Orator, a collection of political essays, poems, and dialogues he wrote or collected, and published so long ago—1797—which Wilson quotes: “‘To scatter the clouds of ignorance and error from the atmosphere of reason; to remove the film of prejudice from the mental eye; and thus to irradiate the benighted mind with the cheering beams of truth,’” this is the aim of literature.
“We read,” Wilson continues, “because without books our world shrinks, our empathy thins, and our liberty wanes.” And, “We read because we have been given the gift of imagination and intellect, and we exhibit our gratitude by using it.”
Jesus has something to say about this business: “After telling a story to his disciples, he asks, ‘Are you listening to this? Really listening?’ [Matt. 13:9] Rather than leave the disciples in a state of perplexity, he unpacks the story for them, teaching them how to read so that they know how to really see and hear. In church tradition, this is called ‘contemplation’. …Contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living. […] The contemplative vision is ultimately life-giving.”
A book, then, can become “part of how we live.” But that doesn’t mean we ought devour only self-help volumes. “[W]e tend to assume that all our actions must be of use. We long to be busy and productive members of society,” Wilson points out. “But this is not our end.” It’s simpler than that: “We are meant to be human beings….” Humane humans. And to that end, she affirms, “Reading must be a daily spiritual practice for the Christian.”
Ken Fredrick
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“Something to take heart in”
Yes, even here “teachers and librarians have been under attack for making available materials” that some find challenging, suspect, disputable. “I view the loss of access to these materials to be tragic,” she declares. “I know, too, that, if left unchallenged, these attempts will not stop. They are spreading. They are increasingly well-organized. It is up to readers to confront these challenges and bans with the assertion of the vital role that sharing information—sharing stories—plays in all of our lives.”
So it is that Dobson taught a first-year course organized around the theme of banned and challenged books. Nearly 90 students enrolled, and they and their teacher “took on the task of studying some of the most controversial books of the 20th and 21st centuries.” And what did they conclude? “[T]he books that we studied endeavoured to provide sincere, meaningful interrogations of social and cultural questions. …We did not find books that were attempting to turn readers into anything other than their best selves.”
In fact, Dobson’s students made it clear—“overwhelmingly” clear—that they “did not want to be told what they could or could not read. They wanted to make up their minds for themselves. […] If there is something to take heart in,” she affirms, “it is this desire to have materials available, and to encounter them in conversation, in community, and in dialogue with one another.”
