I'm Sorry, I Don't Read

An owed tu voluntari eeliteracy

Have you ever had that feeling when reading a book, where your eyes glaze over, your head starts to hurt, you instinctively nod downwards as if your skull has just gained a kilo, and your eyes are forced to dart back to the start of the page because you haven’t retained any information? Have you ever had that feeling when ― well, I have. I feel some variation of this feeling every time I read. I just don’t like reading. In the past four years, I have read maybe two and a half books. I do enjoy having finished a book, but that probably also has something to do with the pain of reading going away. 

And yet, I give off the appearance of being well-read. I know a decent amount of literary trivia, I can tell you roughly what happens in most classics, and I have two university degrees to my name and a third on the way — all in the humanities, no less. My go-to line to explain why I hate reading is: “I’m illiterate. I don’t read; it hurts my head,” which is often met with, “Why are you doing a second master’s in philosophy, then? ... HOW are you doing a second master’s in philosophy?” Surely I must listen to countless audiobooks or have someone whispering whole anthologies in my ear while I sleep. Nope. I can’t concentrate on audiobooks either; they become meaningless background noise, and I have yet to enlist a bedside whisperer — though applications are now officially open.  

In all honesty, I’m not sure how I do it. I do try to do the assigned readings for my modules, but most of the information I have accumulated over the years is just absorbed from wherever I can get it: conversations with friends, lectures, late-night YouTube binges, frantic Google-searching, historical video games, Wikipedia deep-dives, and the like. Granted, some of this inevitably involves some reading, but it’s far from the systematic and gruelling line-by-line reading involved in reading a book. It’s more like stumbling through an open market, picking up whichever shiny things catch my eye until I have a basket full of miscellaneous knick-knacks ready to proudly display but whose provenance I am blissfully unaware of. 

Despite this whole illiteracy thing working out for me — at least, so far — I feel an immense societal and personal pressure to read. From a societal standpoint, reading is often held up as the thing smart, ‘cultured’ people do. It supposedly makes people more interesting and imaginative, and even teaches them valuable lessons about morality, friendship, love, and every other ostensibly ‘good’ thing. From a personal standpoint, I can’t possibly expect my academic streak to last, nor can I expect others to read and enjoy my writing, especially if I don’t extend the same courtesy to literary giants, let alone my peers. 

But, still, I stand firm: you don’t need to read! People who spend every waking hour with their nose in a book are — believe it or not — no more interesting than those who prefer experiencing the world around them. They also aren’t necessarily more imaginative, especially if half their thoughts are some simulation of something they read elsewhere. Nor are they more attuned to the good and the fine. They may be better at picking out a good book, but there’s no reason to suggest they would be better at picking out a good friend or a fine wine.

That being said, I am not suggesting that people who enjoy reading should stop doing it. I may be a staunch bibliophobe, but what happens behind closed doors between you and your books is none of my business. I simply want to push back against a snobbish, supremacist attitude towards reading which I find particularly pervasive in the academically-inclined spaces I frequent. Reading books does not make you special, and choosing not to read them does not make you some boorish philistine either. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled, whether that’s reading the classics, reading only trashy young-adult romances, or not reading at all. And don’t let anyone tell you what or how much you should be reading … unless, of course, they tell you to read my articles.