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To answer the title: both yes and no. Most people think that reading is good and necessary, even indispensable, but if survival per se is the most essential thing in life, I could throw in tons of evidence that there are a lot of men and women out there who are making an impressive amount of money without having read a single book. And yet, if reading were not a good enough a thing to do, there wouldn’t have been so many books written and sold throughout history.
Today, bookstores are among the most frequented places in any culture all over the world, which means that the majority of people do enjoy reading. Irrespective of this agreeable overall proclivity, there are some problems with reading in general. One of them is accessibility. Books are not cheap, and not all of us can afford to have a library of our own. Next, the language barrier, meaning that some might speak a tongue into which the majority of the most valuable books are not translated. The contrary might happen too. Take Sakartvelo, for instance. This is a country of only five million people at the most, including the emigree part of the nation. Of this unimpressive number, only one million might actually be eager readers. And yet, one can hardly find a significant piece of literature that was not translated into Georgian. A Georgian reader can read almost anything in their own language, be it Virgil, Homer, Bocaccio, Alighieri, Shakespeare, Twain, Dostoevsky, Proust or Joyce, to mention only a few of those famous giants of pen. Concerning modern-day literature, there hardly passes a week in this country without seeing a translation of a new good book on a store shelf, in stores which suffer no shortage of interested buyers.
There is another obstacle in the way of enjoying reading, and that is time. In the overly busy days of ours, when it always hangs heavy on almost everybody’s hands, it is very hard to find time to read. One of the greatest geniuses of our civilization, Arthur Schopenhauer, once said that it would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them.
Going further, while time is definitely a problem, the worst predicament in terms of reading is what to read. Deeply analyzing the phenomenon of reading, Schopenhauer continues that a bad book destroys the mind. If we believe him, we should only read good books, but who can tell us which reading matter is good and which is bad? Meanwhile, the genius says, when we read, another person thinks for us. Isn’t it wonderful when others think for us and we have a chance to pick the unusually appreciable minds of those who he calls ‘others’?
Unfortunately, we cannot memorize easily and forever what we read, and that is the darkest part of the process. But, to continue in the words of this outstanding German philosopher, to desire that a man should retain everything he has ever read is the same as wishing him to retain in his stomach all that he has ever eaten. So, let’s not regret our human forgetfulness and our incapacity to memorize all that we read, and give the best usage to the time spent and the energy employed.
Reading habits are changing nowadays, so rapidly and drastically that someday in the near future, all those once critically valuable books may end up laying idle. The tendency to satisfy one’s curiosity not with the help of a traditional reading habit, but via momentarily effective internet tools, is persistently killing the significance of books. Kids no longer want to simply read; they also want to see and hear, and do so in a split second. Parents are at a genuine loss. They are doing their possible best to talk their children into reading. The other day, I read in the New York Times of September 7-8, 2024, that there is a mom in America who paid her child $100 to read a book. She says we should too!
Blog by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
