Why You Should Read Literature

Of late I have neglected my reading. My fourth grade teacher Mrs. Forney can take credit for starting this particular habit. At the beginning of the year we each received a metal ring. The ring's purpose was to hold index cards with the name and a brief summary of each book that we read throughout the year. Since it was like a contest I quickly started plowing through Goosebumps and Hank the Cowdog until I had somewhere near one hundred cards by the end of the year. Since then I've just kept reading. Along the way there have been some road bumps. I still have not completed a book written by Charles Dickens, but I do wish that he lived in the age of motorcars so that he could've been gruesomely ended by one of them. Regardless, I have kept reading. And I've always focused on literature instead of fiction. Huge difference here and the impetus for my writing tonight.

People typically view non-fiction as a source of personal betterment and sage advice. Here is where my path diverges, and I'm going to try to show you why I'm right. Which is weird because I never ever ever do that winky face. Non-fiction is not what you should be reading to inspire change or improve your station. We can start with motivation. I can't look at a single rack of books on effective habits or engaging leadership without thinking that more than fifty percent of the author's motivation was dollar dollar bills, y'all. I look at the authors and wonder about their histories and their qualifications to tell other people how to live and act. I've hinted at it so I'll just call it out: Stephen Covey isn't qualified to tell people how to live. He did receive an MBA from Harvard and he has a doctorate in Religious Education, but his most successful endeavor to date has been telling people that he knows a better way to live than they do without anything in the vicinity of proof. It is great to get other people's viewpoints on things. Actually it's essential for us to thrive, but this is not the way to do it. And please don't read books on management or leadership. To save you the time I'll summarize all of them ever written right now: If you treat people with respect and show them that they have personal value, they will respond by acting respectably and valuable. Gasp.

This paragraph is about why you shouldn't limit your reading to David Baldacci, Stephen King, etc. As a note please understand that I do enjoy the occasional foray off of my high horse and read something that is technically garbage for pure self-indulgence, but that's my caution here. Much like eating nothing but Peeps for every meal will leave you fat, toothless, virginal and dead at thirty-three, reading nothing but genre fiction will leave your brain fat, toothless, virginal, and dead at thirty-three. These books are guilty pleasure. The literary equivalent of masturbating while thinking of the cougar next door that keeps wearing those sweaters with the plunging necklines. Keep it up and in a decade she will be sixty-five and no amount of therapy will be able to help you. Substitute all of the above references with genre fiction and you have my point.

Now we arrive at contemporary writers. The examples that come to my mind are The Hunger Games, anything by Chuck Palahniuk, The Harry Potter series, Tom Robbins, etc. In and of themselves benign, but the problem seeps in around the edges when you realize that all these are doing is marinating your thoughts in our current sociopolitical stew. The reason there are Timothy McVeigh's in the world is that with so much access to information we can swaddle ourselves in our own little world where are thoughts are never challenged and fester like plague. Like it or not, all of these authors above, no matter how divergent you think they may be, are all ringing the bell of class difference in our modern age somewhere in their writing. While it isn't always the main theme of the story, it's there, much the same way that your house smells like your pet no matter how much you clean and no matter how little you notice. Literature is the antidote. Truly timeless literature doesn't really push an agenda. On the Road and Of Mice and Men aren't pushing agendas, they just tell a story. Even if you read a book like Slaughterhouse Five which is pushing an agenda, it's not our agenda. It's an agenda for a world just coming out of war. Our hippie liberals are different than those hippie liberals. And that's what we need right now. We need to spend our days trying to find ways that our viewpoints are wrong or need to be modified instead of this insanely dogmatic environment that we live in. I am right and you are an idiot for disagreeing with me is usually the opening line to a story that ends poorly for the thick-skull. The learning in literature is ceaseless as well. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair is writing about the horrific treatment of meatpacking workers in Chicago in the early 1800's. Read that book and you realize that while we have labor laws and two hundred years of experience under our belts every company still "speeds up" on it's employees, we just have different words now. So finish up The Hunger Games trilogy but go out and pick up The Heart of Darkness or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Your brain will reward you with green sprouts of fresh thoughts and an oxygen that you haven't felt in awhile.