A Workout for the Brain

The latest reading figures have produced the usual modest celebration. A few more children say they enjoy reading, and this is presented as evidence that things are moving in the right direction. But most children still don’t read for pleasure, and reading, as an activity, has been in decline for years. 

We might therefore ask a less comfortable question: why should anyone choose to read, given the alternatives? It’s for old people, isn’t it?

A book makes substantial demands on its reader. A 300-page novel may take eight hours to consume. During that time there are innumerable other things to do, most of them offering more intense and more frequent rewards. And reading gets harder for people who don’t read regularly. Concentration, like stamina, is acquired through use. The less you read, the more effort reading requires and the less attractive it becomes.

Oddly, though, the effort involved in running or going to the gym does not militate against exercise. Quite the reverse. We understand that effort is exactly the point. You develop stamina by doing something that requires stamina, and knowing that makes it rewarding.

We need to think about books in the same way. A good book is a workout for the brain. It makes you concentrate, remember, imagine, follow an argument, deal with unfamiliar ideas and even struggle to understand what an author is saying. And that struggle may not be a defect: it may be invigorating. 

But there is a catch. Not every book is a good workout. Much of what is published is intellectual junk food. There is no particular virtue in spending eight hours reading something undemanding, let alone badly written, simply because it is a book.

So perhaps all our middle-class and elderly talk about the benefits of reading—any reading—needs recalibrating. Rather than telling the unconverted that books are good per se, we might talk about developing judgement, and learning to rate the payback that any particular book offers, the way we distinguish between different marathons—London, Sydney, Athens—and between different types of weights and gym apparatus.

That means switching from trying to persuade the reluctant of the excellence of reading in general, and of individual titles in particular, to learning simply to recognise a book’s qualities for ourselves—and, as our judgement becomes more articulate, to register the improvement in our own performance. 

That judgement takes practice. You read something difficult and discover you can follow it. You make sense of how it was constructed, how characters were developed, how storylines were held back or intertwined. You also learn to discard what is not worth the effort. You acquire a sense of values and of your own growing competence. Depending on the title, you might even be entertained or moved or enlightened.

That seems a more honest argument for reading. Not that every book is good for you, or that more reading is better in itself, but that honing your little grey cells is something necessary. Which fitness freak would not want to hone their mental muscles as well as their abs? 

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