Letters arrive at this address from an improbably wide range of places, and I confess I read every one. It was a message from a reader in Seoul last week, though, that put the question more bluntly than most. She was a woman in her thirties, an office worker by trade, and she confessed — with a candour I rather admired — that she used to finish a book a month until sometime in her fourth year at the company, when the habit simply died of neglect. She wanted to know whether it was worth resurrecting. Was reading, in this particular year of our Lord, still a defensible use of a scarce and exhausted hour, when the phone offers so very much for so very little effort?
It is a fair question, and I have never had much patience for the sort of answer that meets it with a superior smile, as though the value of literature were too rarefied to explain to the uninitiated. That is the answer of a bore. So let me try instead to give her — and whoever else finds their way to this page, in whatever country, on whatever device — three actual reasons, argued as plainly as a semi-reclusive Scotsman knows how.
I should confess first that I do not read out of some monkish devotion to Culture, capital C intended. I read, if I am honest, partly out of loneliness, partly out of habit, and partly because I have found nothing else that does quite what a good book does. That is not a terribly noble motive. It happens to be a true one, and true motives are, in my experience, rather more persuasive than noble ones.
1. Reading rebuilds a muscle the age has let waste away
The American neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has spent a career studying what she calls the reading brain, and her central worry, laid out at some length in her book Reader, Come Home, is a simple one: the kind of reading most of us now do — skimming a screen for the gist, hunting for the keyword, jumping straight to the conclusion — trains the brain to do exactly that, and only that, superbly well. What it starves is the slower circuitry: the patience to sit inside a long sentence, to hold a character's contradictions in mind without resolving them, to tolerate not knowing where a paragraph is going until it gets there.
This is not, I think, an entirely Western anxiety dressed up in neuroscience. Anyone who has sat with a Joseon-era sijo — a compact, three-line Korean verse form that turns on a single hinge of meaning — or studied the East Asian aesthetic principle known as yeobaek, literally "white space," the deliberate blank left in a painting that is not empty but active, doing its work precisely by refusing to be filled, will recognise the same argument arriving from an older, quieter tradition. The unhurried mind is not a luxury reserved for one culture or another. It is a skill, and like any skill, it atrophies the moment we stop using it. A novel is, among other things, a two-hundred-page exercise machine for the attention span, and there are precious few of those left in a world engineered to fragment it.
2. Reading is the only reliable machine we have built for empathy
At the University of Toronto, the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley spent the better part of two decades investigating a deceptively simple question: does reading fiction actually make people better at understanding other minds? Their findings, replicated more than once, suggest that it does — that people who read a great deal of narrative fiction tend to score measurably higher on tests of empathy and what psychologists call theory of mind, the capacity to infer what another person is thinking or feeling, than people who read mostly non-fiction or nothing at all. The theory is that fiction functions as a kind of flight simulator for social life: you cannot follow a character through three hundred pages of grief, ambition, or self-deception without, in some small way, learning to fly that particular aircraft yourself.
I find this rather less surprising than the researchers seem to. It hardly matters which direction the crossing runs — a Scotsman working his way through Han Kang, an American discovering Tolstoy for the first time, a reader in Lagos or São Paulo opening Fitzgerald for reasons that have nothing to do with New York. Consider what any of these actually asks of you. Take my own recent evening with Han Kang's The Vegetarian, read as a fifty-something Scotsman with no particular expertise in either vegetarianism or Korean domestic life. You are required to sit for hours inside a consciousness that is not yours, shaped by a language, a family structure, and a set of social expectations that are not yours either, and to do so without the comfort of a narrator explaining everything to you in terms you already recognise. That is empathy in its most literal, unglamorous form: the unpaid, unrewarded labour of imagining a life you did not live. No documentary, no article, and certainly no algorithm-fed video clip demands nearly so much of you, which is precisely why so few of them deliver nearly so much in return.
3. Reading is the one room in your mind you still furnish yourself
Here is the reason I trust least to explain well, because it is the one I feel most strongly and can prove least. We live, nearly all of us now, wherever we happen to live, inside an almost continuous stream of narrative that we did not choose and did not write: the recommendation engine, the algorithmic feed, the fifteen-second video that decides, on your behalf, what deserves your attention next. Very little of what fills a modern mind in a given day was actually selected by that mind. Most of it was selected for it, by systems with no particular interest in your wellbeing, only your attention.
A book, by contrast, remains one of the last spaces where you, and only you, decide what furnishes your interior life, sentence by sentence, at the pace you set. This is not a small thing. The Korean concept of han — that particular, largely untranslatable ache of internalised sorrow with no clean remedy — is often described as something one carries rather than resolves. I have come to think the nearest modern equivalent, in the West quite as much as in the East, is a kind of interior emptiness that also has no clean remedy — except this: the deliberate, private act of choosing what you think about, for an hour, undictated by anyone else's design. Reading will not fix your life. It will, however, hand you back a small, stubborn corner of your own mind, which in this particular decade is no small inheritance, wherever on the map you happen to be reading these words.
To the reader in Seoul, then, and to anyone else, in whichever city or time zone these words happen to find you, who has quietly let the habit lapse: no, you do not need to finish a book a month to justify starting again. You need only one evening, one chapter, and the modest, unfashionable willingness to sit still while somebody else's sentences do their slow work on you. It is, I promise you, a stranger and more valuable transaction than it looks — in Seoul, in Edinburgh, or anywhere in between.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
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