Endless Blocks of Text With Some Hidden, Artistic Point: Three Reasons Why Kids and Teenagers Don’t Like to Read Books
It’s hard to find time to read a book. So many gifs, memes, and social media updates about delayed film shoots are competing for our eyeballs. Even doomscrolling itself, in the time of corona, I must admit, is addicting. It’s hard to break away from the relentless pull of the Internet and slow the world down to the carefully chosen words of an author with a bonafide book. Short social media updates on young American soccer players in Europe give me a fix I find hard to resist as a US soccer fan.
But it’s not just the news and social media updates that leave the books on my nightstand unopened. It’s basic responsibilities like work and exercise and preparing meals that take up time. There are so many things that get in the way of us reading books (and reading). I can only assume that if you’ve made it this far, you either a.) scrolled down and caught this sentence to see if this story would get anymore interesting or b.) are a family member.
There’s nothing wrong with using Snapchat, Tik Tok, or whatever social media app will come next. But spending several hours a day using social media at the very least takes time away from learning how to read and think critically and getting enough practice doing so. What would happen to you if the only things you read were social media updates and articles you came across on the web? What exactly would you be missing out on if you didn’t read books and how would that affect you? What can you gain from reading books that you can’t gain anywhere else, including tweets and articles? Is there such a thing that reading books affords to you that nothing else does? These are hard questions to answer for sure.
The further I write this, the more I am aware of how much I’ve already lost the attention of the people I want to talk to: people who don’t read books (but who most likely read things like captions, memes, and short articles online). This includes a few of my former students. Perhaps I should have made a Tik Tok or Snapchat about reading. Maybe that would be more persuasive.
But plenty of kids, teenagers remain unconvinced. As a former language arts teacher and twenty-something who can still remember what reading for school was like, let me briefly lay out the immediate counterarguments I’ve heard for each reason.
- Reading can be an absolutely fascinating, magical experience.
Counterargument: I don’t need to read a book. Watching a really good movie can make me feel a whole mix of emotions.
Me: Okay, yeah, you got a point.
2. Reading can expand your vocabulary, and a larger vocabulary can help you understand the world in different ways.
Counterargument: If I don’t understand a word, I can just Google it.
Me: Yeah, but the kind of vocabulary that makes up verbal communication is different from the kind that makes up written communication. And what if you can’t Google it?
3. You can learn all sorts of interesting things from reading.
Counterargument: I can do that, too, by watching a documentary or educational video. In fact, that would save me some time. Reading books takes a lot of time when I could just watch a video for two hours and save lots of time.
Me: You got a point, but, generally, nonfiction books contain more information than documentaries do.
And so on. Some teenagers may find the ideas that lie behind these reasons convincing, but for some of them, it doesn’t appear that they’d be missing out on a whole lot. What would they be missing out on if they watched the movie instead of reading the book? For a few, there may not be much of a difference.
Some kids have become so turned off by any well-meaning teachers’ and parents’ attempts to persuade them to read that any moment caught in the classroom of them with a book open is worth a victory lap around the school hallways. My best advice to foster a love of reading is letting kids pick their own books to read and setting aside a time for them to read. With this, they can pursue their own interests and be given a level of autonomy they can take pride in. If you’re a teacher, that may mean giving students a few minutes at the end of class to read. If you’re a parent, that may mean doing a number of things that can all build up and have a cumulative effect on a kid’s character and personal beliefs, such as:
- Reading to your kids at the earliest age.
- Taking trips to the library regularly. (My mom would take me and my sisters to the library about once a week during the summer.)
- Reading to your kids as often as possible, even when they know how to read on their own. (My mom and dad read books — children’s picture books and chapter books and even, I remember, Philip Pullman’s YA fantasy novel The Golden Compass to me and my sisters.)
- Talking about books you’ve read and that they’re reading. The things you and your kid read about in books may not have as much relevance as the pressing demands of real life but are just as worthy of conversation since they offer, for example, an opportunity to understand character’s motivations that are similar to the people you know in real life.
- Reading books yourself. Kids look to their peers and adults in life to understand what behavior’s considered normal. A society with an incapacity for the kind of self-reflection encouraged from reading books is one that continues to make the same kind of mistakes. Let’s avoid that and normalize book-reading.
- Setting aside time to read, perhaps in the evening when you’re winding down and need to lower your level of arousal for sleep. This is one way to form a good habit of reading.
- Limiting their use of technology no matter what they say about multitasking. If given a choice, plenty of kids will spend time on their phone rather than read a book. If kids are tired and just want to chill, their phones become an even more attractive choice. Choosing cell phones over books repeatedly can become a habit that’s hard to break. Trust me. I know because I struggle with this at times.
Doing these things as a parent or as a teacher is more persuasive in getting kids to read than telling them they need to learn how to read well in order to survive in the real world. As true as that may be, that reason makes reading out to be some onerous duty, some adult thing you have to do like filling out tax forms, and not the engaging, morally instructive, educational, magical, and flat-out fun experience it can be.
But what if these steps to nurture a love of reading fall short? You can compose an eloquent entreaty on why they should crack open a book and get reading. They can learn more about themselves as human beings and what motivates other people and they can learn about the world, while perhaps being entertained by the driving force of a narrative. Hopefully, they will catch your enthusiasm for reading and buy in. Those impassioned cries to read are much more persuasive than bluntly explaining to people that the reason they don’t like to read is because they’re not good at it. Hearing that you’re bad at reading is almost akin to hearing someone say that you’re stupid. 1. It’s not a kind thing to say 2. You’re learning at your own pace and 3. I can think of a few intelligent people who are great at forming connections, making friendships, visualizing engineering projects, and more but stay away from books for the most part. To be clear, though, those people are the exception, not the norm.
On the other hand, there are kids who find reading boring because the books they read for school are too easy for them. With these books, they’re still learning how to demand more of a worthwhile reading experience by asking the text thought-provoking questions. The stories they’re reading may be too familiar to them. (Indeed, they may have read the short story in a previous grade, as I found out with one short story I assigned.) They’re smart, take copious amounts of notes, and can tell you every plot point for an A. However, they’re still learning how to interact with literary texts by responding to the words an author supplies and creating their own personally meaningful interpretation of them. This is something that anyone can get better at with time.
Furthermore, it can be difficult for teachers to select literary texts for students to read. The literary texts should be challenging, but not too challenging to read with the guidance of a teacher who helps them comprehend and, by extension, analyze on their own. Differentiation, of course, comes to play here where students are allowed to pick books that are slightly above their reading level so that they are a bit of a challenge. Of course, differentiation does not eliminate two reasons why kids don’t like to read. These reasons may affect kids who find reading too easy and thus boring and kids who find reading too difficult and thus confusing (and frustrating as long as they really try to understand what’s happening in the story.)
As far as I can see, there are three main reasons — apart from learning disorders like dyslexia — that get in the way of kids (and people in general) enjoying reading. These reasons pertain to our lives in the 21st century in a digitally connected world. One reason involves the differences in reading skills required to read short-form content, such as texts and short articles versus long-form writing such as books. The second reason involves the differences in skills required to appreciate print as a medium versus film as a medium. And the third reason involves an unintended consequence that may occur from teaching literature in English class.
Reason #1: Sustaining Your Attention for a Long Period of Time is Hard to Do
Let’s start with the first reason: the skill set and attention required to read books is quite different from scrolling up news feeds to see whatever catches your eye, reading simple text messages, tweets, and social media updates. I’ve seen students become frustrated from their difficulty in making the jump between scanning — that is, searching for specific information in a piece of writing — and sustaining their attention when reading for fifteen minutes. The thing is that young digital media users change their focus of attention online, every few seconds or so (Yeykelis et al.) For example, a person may open one tab to check $GME stock, open another one to read r/wallstreetbets, watch a video about what short-selling a stock is, open another tab to find out what a hedge fund is — all within ten minutes. This kind of skill is great when you want to cut time and search for specific information however random it may be, but it’s not the kind of reading skill you use when reading fiction. That is, unless you’re quickly skimming the back of a book to see if there are any number of things that might convince you to read the book: brief excerpts of critical acclaim, literary awards or nominations, an interesting blurb, an impressive two-sentence author bio. The meaning of an entire story is gathered as a whole. It’s meaning is an event that unfolds, ideally without interruption or distraction, to the reader as she reads and then reflects on what’s being stated directly, indirectly, if what the author says holds some truth, and why that matters if it does.
I am not claiming that social media usage zaps your attention span to that of a goldfish, but I am saying that reading so many short-form writing on social media does take time away from practicing how well you can concentrate on reading a book. This argument — that time spent on social media takes away from time reading books rather than adding on to it — is one shared by Jean Twenge, PhD, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. In a study done by Dr. Jean M. Twenge and her colleagues, they discovered after analyzing survey data on digital media use and legacy media use (print media like books and newspapers; TV and movies) that digital media displaces and reduces the use of legacy media rather than supplementing it (Twenge et al. 339). From the late 2000s/early 2010s to 2016, twelfth graders have spent more time using digital media (the Internet, gaming, and social media) and less time texting.
As digital media usage increased, legacy media (including books, newspapers, and magazines) decreased: “In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, only 16 percent did” (Twenge).
Using survey data from Monitoring the Future, an ongoing study that surveys eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth-grade students’ usage of social media and legacy media since 1976, Twenge and her colleagues discovered that as adolescents spent more time using digital media, they spent less time using legacy media (which includes going to see a movie in a movie theatre and watching TV). Time spent using digital media didn’t complement the time they spent using legacy media. Rather, digital media usage took time away from legacy media usage.
This is a trend I can see continuing unless we, as parents, as teachers, and as role models speak to adolescents about the elasticity of time. How in the modern attention economy, time spent doing one thing is an opportunity lost to something else. It is, so to speak, an opportunity cost. Of course, how do you convince young people to take advantage of the time they have now? Look at me. I’m twenty-seven and have spent an embarrassing amount of time watching videos of baby moose online.
We can’t do without reading books and essays and articles written carefully and thoughtfully, pieces of long-form writing that require you, the reader, to really tossle with the text and, in the process, develop your ability to think critically. With books, magazines, newspapers, and essays, you are called to do a number of critical-thinking skills so that you do not accept things blindly out of ignorance. You are called to take part in what Deborah Meier, an education pioneer and MacArthur award winner, calls the “Five Habits of Mind” in her 2009 essay “Democracy at Risk.” You are called to examine evidence for someone’s claims, consider others’ points of view, see if there are any patterns and any consequences of those patterns, hypothesize what might have been or could have happened, and ask why this all matters (Meier 47). For the most part, tweets, texts, Instagram posts, and short, informational articles online, don’t challenge you enough to do these things as a reader. As students grow older, they become more aware of how challenging different pieces of writing can be. Their frustration with reading lies with the expectation they may set for themselves that an essay they have to read for class may be just as easy to read as an article they’ve read online. This is a frustration I’ve had myself.
When I was in high school, I was a skinny, bespectacled dweeb who found the idea of rereading a passage in a book somewhat insulting. I fully expected myself to understand everything I read in a book the first time I read it. I’ve seen this kind of attitude in some of my former students. Some of them had the idea, like I did once, that reading well comprises a few things:
- Moving your eyeballs across the page from left to right
- Knowing the definition of every word you come across
- Using context clues to guess the meanings of words you do not know
This is a basic understanding of how to read well, and I should be more charitable, so let’s throw in a fourth skill.
4. Taking notes to summarize the main points an author is making.
Here is where we begin to see that reading really is an active process. In translating the words of an author to short, abbreviated notes, you encode them into your long-term memory, sometimes with personal meanings, which can make them more memorable. Plenty of kids know why they need to take notes, but I’m not sure how many kids are aware of just how involving reading is, how vivid are the images that can form inside their minds when reading imaginative literature, how you may have to construct mental maps and consider if an author is addressing the most immediate counterarguments and infer what is being implied with the choice of a word like “pontificate” and consider whether that’s meant as a slight or not. This alone is just a small part of what good readers do.
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, the authors of the classic guide to intelligent reading How to Read a Book, explain that reading actively is like playing catcher in a game of baseball. They note that reading and listening are typically viewed as passively receiving a message from someone who is sending it to you. To clarify how demanding reading and listening are, they use this baseball analogy: “Catching the ball is just as much of an activity as pitching or hitting it” (5). The art of catching is like the art of reading. A really good catcher can catch “every kind of pitch — fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers” (Adler and Doren 5). Really good readers are adept at receiving all sorts of communications: some direct, some indirect, some thinly veiled, some understated, some ironic, and some merely implied. Active reading requires you the reader to imagine you are living in the fictional world the author constructed. It calls upon you to flex your imagination, a “skill” that requires plenty of play to develop.
Reason 2: Responding to an Author’s Imagery With Your Imagination Is Hard to Do Sometimes
One other reason some kids don’t like to read is that the impressive visual storytelling of a film adaptation can be much, much more attractive than the images that form in their minds as they read. This can be awfully discouraging and can make them feel like they’re stupid and/or missing out on something important. A hair-raising chase sequence in and out of houses in Morocco (like what happens in The Bourne Ultimatum) may just be a series of moves the main character takes, and so they may struggle to understand how this could be as equally exciting as watching it on screen.
Kurt Vonnegut, author of the literary classic Slaughterhouse-Five, makes a great analogy to how mentally involved we must be as readers: “If you take ink on paper and make people respond to it, they themselves are going to have to be performers. It’s like arriving at a concert hall and being handed a violin, and you’re expected to play. That’s what we expect readers to do, perform themselves, because they’re half of the performance.” Vonnegut’s last sentence here echoes the sentiment that Adler and Van Doren expressed with their baseball analogy. Reading is half of the performance in understanding and appreciating a book. The other half belongs to the writer who may not do a good job of helping you understand it if it’s poorly written. So, if a kid’s reading something that is, in fact, poorly written, it’s easy to see how insecure that kid may feel in her abilities as a reader, especially during a time when she is focused on achieving competence in her psychosocial development.
Children and adolescents have enormous creative potential with their imaginations as readers since they are able to think more flexibly than adults. One study conducted by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik discovered that cognitive flexibility — that is, the ability to adapt when given new information — decreases from childhood to adulthood. This great cognitive flexibility enables them to generate ideas and imagine new things in response to what they read. They have enormous creative potential to become immersed in a worthwhile reading experience but may find it difficult to create mental imagery if they struggle with some of the skills associated with executive function such as focusing on a task and persisting if distracted.
Creating different types of mental imagery — sight, sound, taste, smell, and more — can be difficult to do as a reader when you are more concerned with keeping up with a complex plot and decoding words quickly enough to finish the dang book. Doing these things can be hard enough because reading isn’t natural the way speaking is. Writing just hasn’t been around long enough for the human brain to make any major evolutionary changes to adapt to it. Just 5,400 years ago, the Sumerians were the first to develop writing by making little markings on clay tablets (Andrews). Compare that number to the range of estimates researchers have given for when language first emerged: as late as 50,000 years to as early as two million years ago when the human genus was beginning and homo sapiens had yet to come to Earth’s party (Balter).
Like the argument I made before about lack of practice with sustaining attention for long periods of time, some kids and teenagers don’t get as much practice producing mental imagery based off of non-visual stimuli if they spend more time watching videos than reading (not that one necessarily displaces the other.) Film, of course, isn’t completely bereft of opportunities for viewers to use their imaginations. Horror uses this to its full advantage. (What’s standing in that dark hallway, honey?) Kids can follow along to a Netflix show very attentively, predict what will happen next in the ongoing narrative, and have thoughtful discussions with their friends about the show. But since film is such a sensationally rich medium, the imaginative challenges thrown at viewers aren’t as tall as the ones thrown at readers.
Ask some kids to read a book and they will groan audibly because they believe watching a film would be much more visually arresting than using more of their imaginations. Imagery in a story is essential because if a story appears real — that is, visually compelling — and holds enough of a seductive mystery, they’ll want to wrestle with the assumptions it holds and see if its vision of life is similar to their own.
Visualization is just one part of imagination, a term that’s difficult to define comprehensively with enough specificity and hard to objectify and quantify. However, I worry that kids and teenagers who grow older without having developed their imaginations may have dreams that are too realistic. That they may aspire to attain a certain profession not because they truly care about it, but because they figure they have a higher probability for landing that job. For it’s a skill, too, to wonder what the world must be like when you’re a kid and have seen just a sliver of it. To imagine who you would like to become by the time you’re an adult. It’s fiction that offers in spades the chance to wonder. Both in fiction and nonfiction, a great author makes you ask questions beyond providing answers. However you respond to these questions like “What if you were born in India?” as you’re reading a novel that takes place in India with the limited knowledge you have is you stepping into an unfamiliar territory. It is no accident that the words wander and wonder are similar to each other. As you test your imagination, you wander away from conventional, expected answers that may only somewhat satisfy you toward things wholly new to you. Consider, for example, how different your life would be if you were born in India. Would you be Hindu, too? Muslim? If so, what does that imply? How much of your identity was formed by your environment? You might not arrive at a definitive answer on how different your life would be, but at least your wonder led you to examine your own life. It’s books that can provide opportunities for wonder.
Reason #3: Appreciating a Book in English Class Can Be Hard to Do When You’re Being Asked to Analyze It Front to Back, Top to Bottom, and Inside Out
There’s a third thing that I believe gets in the way of kids enjoying reading, and it is something I learned as an English teacher. My worry is that some kids and teenagers will take longer than usual to understand that authors do not aim to communicate clearly 100% of the time, especially in a work of fiction and that communicating effectively is not the same thing as communicating clearly. This misconception can arise from not just writing essays for class but from searching for information online. In order to be persuasive, arguments must first be clearly written, but this doesn’t mean devoid of style. The idea goes that you should write clearly in order to make it easier for the person to accept your point of view they might not hold already.
In teaching works of fiction like The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, I’ve made the mistake of using that book in my lessons as if there was something specific to learn, a theme to parse out of the jumbled mess of text that the book may appear as to students, and not as an experience to live through. In English class, students typically expect to learn how an author establishes a theme when reading a novel — and there are good reasons for this from a creative writing and argument-formation standpoint — but the problem is that this approach can make students think the novelist is creating some sort of easily reducible artistic statement to, sometimes, educate readers.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Novelists may want readers to learn something specific at the end of a novel. This authorial desire can be found in polemical literature, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but, well, most of the books in the high school literary canon weren’t written with an educational message in mind. So, when learning how an author establishes a theme, students will sometimes express frustration that an author is not expressing him or herself more clearly. “Why doesn’t he just say that then?” one student asked me after I mentioned one possible idea the author wanted to express.
Because then it would be boring. Because then it wouldn’t be a story. Because then it would be an observation about life and not part of a worthwhile reading experience. Because then it would be forgettable and why not watch some Netflix, instead? Because then it wouldn’t allow us to reflect on similar experiences in our own lives. Because the author isn’t trying to teach you something as much as he or she wants to give you a reading experience that’s hopefully worth your time! (Students then asked me what the author was trying to say, which made me think about how I could help them appreciate literature more. Here’s a Billy Collins poem that can explain why.)
This is an inevitable part of teaching literature: helping students see that different reading skills are required from reading imaginative literature with subtleties aplenty versus reading cogent written arguments. This difficulty doesn’t just come from a mindset they’re trying hard to shake off from reading too many written arguments. It comes from reading plenty of content online meant simply to convey information — captions, texts, short informational articles — rather than provide an immersive reading experience in the form of a story.
From such an immersive reading experience, kids learn how to play make-believe with the text. They imagine themselves as the characters and what will happen next in the story. They feel how they imagine characters must feel when they suffer or become afraid or fall in love. This kind of interactive roleplay with the text encourages kids and teenagers to empathize, a vital skill to have in forming any kind of relationship. One study conducted by Dr. Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto found that people who read fictional books were significantly better at reading emotions just from looking at images of people’s eyes than people who read nonfiction books.
But it is interesting to note that previous studies have suggested that people can boost their emotional intelligence not only by reading literary fiction but by watching fictional TV drama. Participants in this University of Oklahoma study took a test in which they read emotions in images of people’s eyes by choosing which emotion was expressed in the eyes: jealous, panicked, arrogant, or hateful. Participants who watched fictional shows like Good Wife and Lost scored higher on the reading-emotion-in-the-eyes test than people who watched documentaries. The authors of this study, University of Oklahoma psychologists Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes, found that the effect on emotional intelligence in watching fictional shows was almost identical to a 2013 study that compared test results between people who read an excerpt of literary fiction and people who read an excerpt of nonfiction.
Those results may surprise you! Film is typically seen as a medium that does not provide as many gaps for the viewer to fill in with his or her imagination as a reader would when reading a book. But viewers of fictional TV drama really do have to understand the feelings and motivations of characters in order to keep up with the plot. Slouching in front of the TV watching Homeland really isn’t as self-indulgent as you may have thought. You were really just getting a workout in taking perspectives.
Which brings me to the questions I asked near the beginning of this article: What can you gain from reading books that you can’t gain anywhere else, including tweets and articles? Is there such a thing that reading books affords to you that nothing else does?
Reading literature can boost your emotional intelligence with a good dose of empathy and help build your vocabulary. It can reduce cognitive decline, beat stress, and help you sleep at night (Stanborough). These are all great benefits to reading literature, but people whose lives have been, in their own words, transformed by the literature they’ve read most likely wouldn’t point to the reasons (apart from empathy) as for why they read. Their reasons transcend acquiring any health benefits or any marketable skill set with soft skills like critical thinking and empathy. Their reasons are not easy to quantify. Actually, the transformational effect reading literature has had on the lives of passionate readers is most likely immeasurable. But it’s these reasons that I find the most convincing. Reasons like:
- To learn or be reminded that I am not alone. The consolation that you can feel as a reader that others have suffered as you have and survived in some way is beyond measure.
- To examine the fears, beliefs, dreams, and values I hold and consider what those abstract concepts look like in action. What does a courageous leader look like? What does a selfless public servant look like? Literature can offer you these answers in characters.
- To become inspired or filled with hope. Who can measure the value of a feeling that leads you to start a new, fulfilling career or move to a welcoming community? There is no one who can.
There are other places, like fictional TV drama, sports practice, and musical performances that offer you opportunities, like fiction does, to empathize, to understand others’ motivations, and to become emotionally moved by a work of art. You can be consoled and inspired by a movie or music just as much as a book. Despite this, every kid and teenager should have the experience of falling in love with a book no matter how many tries it takes with multiple books and DNFs and horrible unit exams on The Things They Carried. Reading books may be the one place in their lives that tells them about something important and about something real.
A Childhood Memory of Reading
For a time in my life, books — mostly made-up stories — were the only things that told me something true about life. When I was in seventh grade, I pulled out a book on the bookshelf in my English teacher’s classroom that looked interesting. On the front cover was an image of a man burning. The man covered his face with his hand as flames consumed his arms and shoulders. He stood on a pile of burning books.
I took the book home and lived disturbed for a good week. In the novel, firefighters set books on fire in a society where books are banned. The main character’s wife tries to kill herself in the first twenty pages, and characters watch a lot of TV without confronting how unbearably unhappy they are. The main character, one of those book-burning firefighters, meets a seventeen-year-old girl who’s curious about the world and a professor who told him of a time when people used to read books. The main character sneaks a book into his home, reads it with his wife, and slowly begins to wonder what the world should be like.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 left an indelible imprint on my thirteen-year-old brain that will never wear away. I lived for a week in that horrific dystopian world that seemed too extreme to be real. As I’ve grown older and seen more and more people with their phones attached to them like umbilical cords, I’ve realized how prescient its author Ray Bradbury was.
Reading this book as a seventh grader was the first time in my life I realized that books could be more than just entertaining. That they could contain a multitude of truths expressed in ways found nowhere else. Ray Bradbury was telling thirteen-year-old me that books did matter for more than just improving my reading skills. He was telling me some awful, disturbing truths.
Truths like this one: that people can distract themselves from their misery by watching so much television they forget how miserable they were and thus don’t feel the need to resolve their problems that remain. Here were morally dubious characters who didn’t realize how miserable and ignorant they had become. They were suffering from a law created to protect them from being disturbed and confused by any books they read. And they distracted themselves from confronting the lousy nature of their relationships by watching more and more television. What they watched didn’t challenge them to think as much as it entertained and amused them.
When the main character Montag tries to have a conversation with his wife about a woman he saw who chose to burn to death with her books, his wife Mildred criticizes her for not obeying the law. Mildred’s concerned for her safety. She’s worried that she and Montag will be arrested since Montag brought a book home. Montag insists on talking to Mildred about what must be inside books, but Mildred wishes he would just shut up and let her alone. Montag cries out:
“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
It became clear to me, even then at thirteen, that books were important because they told you things, possibly disturbing things, that no one else may be willing to tell you. These things do not take a second to say, but months, if not years for the author to express as he or she’s writing a book. No one in my life was telling me about the deleterious effects of a digital media addiction the way Bradbury was.
It’s unpleasant to imagine what kids and teenagers will miss out on if they don’t read books. Sure, books can be boring and hard to pay attention to, but the greatest books tell you things that no one else tells you. It’s unpleasant to imagine teenagers growing up and learning truths they could have learned earlier if they had read books. Books can snatch you from your ignorance and tell you something true, something no else has told you, even though it may bother you. In closing this, I can’t help but echo the words an intellectually isolated Montag said to his emotionally distant wife: When was the last time you were really bothered by something? About something important, about something real?
References:
Adler, Mortimer, and Charles Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed., Touchstone, 1972.
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Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, 2013, pp. 377–80, doi:10.1126/science.1239918.
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