Thought you might enjoy this essay from last Sunday's NYTBR. So much of the essay resonates with my own experience.
One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass. ...
Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it. [more]
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