Why Should We Read More of Literary Fiction — Part 1
On the pleasure of reading
One of the main reasons we read, in my opinion, is because we want to understand ourselves.
There are of course more facile reasons like entertainment, the need to escape the present world, and in some cases, a morbid need to excel at something (like reading).
But the most important and perhaps the only one of essence is that reading helps us make sense of who we are. We read because in a book full of words we can imagine a whole world for ourselves.
Imagine sitting in a coffee shop with a book, or in your bedroom, or in an aeroplane; it does not matter where you are. Imagine you are reading a book and the author has taken time to create a world for you, which can either be made of scenes or ideas — doesn’t matter.
- When you go through a short story by Ruskin Bond, you get transported to the mountains where a little girl is running after a blue umbrella.
- When you read Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, you get lost in the intricacies of words and images, a dense filmy cornucopia of images keeps bombarding your mind as your eyes run over the pages.
