These are the exact words my work buddy said when he picked up a book from my desk and flipped through it lightning-fast.
“Of course, you wouldn’t understand,” I thought, getting a bit defensive.
Underneath the many layers of my worked-up brain, an important question was nagging at me—why do I read anyway?
Because I like reading.
Well, that’s the short answer.
To arrive at a longer one, I needed to sit down and introspect.
I needed to go back to the first day I read a book. To visit a time in my life when I only dreamt of books. A time when, before going to sleep, I would read The Lord of the Rings until my eyes closed and I dropped the book onto the bed.
Both the book and I would sleep peacefully.
All the books I had read before The Lord of the Rings were non-fiction books about making lots and lots of money and becoming one of the richest people in the world.
I don’t remember anything from those books. They remain in my memory only as book titles. Anyway, they were stepping stones in my reading journey. I had to start somewhere. More importantly, I really enjoyed reading them.
Now, my taste has evolved.
My likes and dislikes about life in general have evolved.
Part II
All I’ve done till now is go back in memory. I still have no answer.
Why do I read anyway?
I specifically picked up The Lord of the Rings because I had seen the trilogy on TV. The first time I saw it, it excited me so much that I really thought there was some way to bring the world to reality; I only had to have faith.
I remember making swords out of sticks, shields out of dry coconut branches, preparing for an imaginary war, and just having a lot of fun. I was young then. Who would have thought that adulthood would shatter this world?
The books provided more lore than the movies ever could. More importantly, they made me fall in love with J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing. I got lost in the endless descriptions of the world. Every time I got lost, I became more excited. There was always a little mystery left unexplored, something I could return to later, when the book called me back.
And in those days, it called me back every few minutes.
This answers some part of the question. I read because I like to live in magical worlds created with love, care, and lots of mystery and history.
After I finished reading all three LOTR books, I was left with a massive hole in my heart.
“What could even compare to this?” I thought. Little did I know that this question would open the gates of fiction, with an inscription above them that read:
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Abandon all hope of ever experiencing life the way you used to. Most of all, abandon all hope of ever being satisfied.
This sounds terribly sad at first, but it opened up a new way of perceiving and experiencing the world. I became aware of my own shortcomings and biases.
I read my first classic novel: 1984 by George Orwell. I got immersed in the storytelling; I could hear a new voice forming in my head that questioned existing social structures and morality. I started reading all the famous classic novels, from Dostoevsky to Charles Dickens. But I always balanced them with fantasy or science fiction because reading only the classics fatigued my mind. Some days, I read to understand the human condition. On other days, I was so done with it that I wanted to withdraw into another world.
Well, this answers how I read, not why I read—maybe the why and the how are connected. Maybe the reason why people read is so obvious that individual introspection of reading habits is unnecessary. I don’t know.
Let me fast-forward a bit in my reading journey to the time I started writing about what I was reading. That may tell me more. I wrote down passages that connected to me on a personal level. Those that questioned my beliefs or offered a fresh line of thinking.
Why do I read anyway?
To potentially come across something that will question my existing thoughts, something that will make me open my reading journal immediately and write.
OK.
It feels like I will come up with different answers for different kinds of books. The answer seems to lie in why I pick a specific type of book.
I pick up classic literature when I want to explore the big concepts, as I call them. I pick up fantasy to escape this world. I pick up biographies to understand the artists behind my favourite works of fiction. I pick non-fiction books to learn something new about something that caught my eye during doomscrolling or when a comprehensive YouTube video on the topic shows up on my feed.
And so on. And so on.
So, why do I read anyway?
I read to question, to learn, to escape, to get inspired, to satisfy my endless curiosity, to learn to live, to learn to be, to follow in the footsteps of the greats, to get entertained, to fall in love, to love falling in love, to become aware of death and time, to understand myself and others, ………….
And so on. And so on.
Check out my poetry here: Poetry