1, #75 - Why read hard books?
Estimated Read Time: 57 seconds.
What’s the point of reading difficult fiction? Besides impressing people, I mean.
I recently came across an author (and psychiatrist) who describes the value of sitting with things we don’t totally understand. It’s uncomfortable, he says, but it opens us up to experiencing beauty & personal healing:
“To sit with Tolkien, Tolstoy, or Dickens requires what researchers call deep reading, something that essentially employs many of the same neurobiological activities required for us to dwell in the presence of others when it is not immediately easy to do so. Deep reading requires willingness to tolerate ambiguity, to accept the distress that emerges in our bodies when we do not ‘get what's going on,’ be that in a novel or in the story of someone sitting across the room from us. We must practice synthesizing information along with our emotional responses to that information while being tempted to put the book down—to come back to it later or perhaps never at all—because of how difficult we find it to read ....
The discipline of deep reading is necessary for us to allow the beauty of the written word to penetrate us. It is a way for us to put ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty—in this case, the artistry of exceptional literature—and to permit it to assist us in the transformation of our trauma and shame by revealing the parts of ourselves we have kept hidden in order to protect our hearts.”
Insight by: Curt Thompson, in The Soul of Desire. Thanks to Elliott Cherry for sharing it!
I recall Tolkien was the most difficult-to-read fiction I’d ever read as a teen, and CS Lewis (outside of his fiction) could be a bit heady as well. It definitely helped me grow as a reader and a thinker. LOTR was one of the first books where I also needed to really focus hard on spatial visualization with the detailed maps and changing landscape.