Person lying on a sofa reading a book in a dimly lit room.

Just before Christmas, I headed up to Barter Books with my family. It’s a great place where you can exchange books you no longer need for credit, which you can then spend on books that other people have brought in. I picked up Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, a big thick history book by former BBC correspondent, Martin Sixsmith.

I finished it this morning; it was a fantastic read. Sixsmith serialised the book on BBC Radio 4 so it’s easier to follow than the usual history book, but still has plenty of Russian names and places for the reader to wrap their head around.

As Audrey Watters notes, reading can often be hard work. It’s tempting to want to read the summary, to optimise your information environment such that you can get on with the important stuff. Where “the important stuff” is, presumably, making money, arguing on the internet, or attempting to turn a lack of empathy for others into a virtue.

Appropriately enough, it’s difficult to adequately summarise Audrey’s argument in this post because it’s nuanced — as the best writing usually is. As she points out, an important part of reading widely is developing empathy. For example, while I still hold a very low opinion of Vladimir Putin, make a lot more sense when put in the context of a 1,000 year narrative arc. It would have been difficult to come to that realisation watching a short YouTube video or social media thread.

Reading can be slow. It can be quite challenging work – and not simply because our attention has been increasingly conditioned, fragmented with distractions and disruptions. And yet from the considered effort of reading comes consideration. So it isn’t simply that we no longer read at length or read deeply; we no longer value contemplation.

[…]

If, as some scholars argue, learning to read does not just build cognition but helps develop empathy – that is, young readers become immersed in stories outside their own experience and thus see the world differently – what are the implications when adults cannot bother to tell stories to their children?

Source: Second Breakfast

Image: Matias North