My teacher told me
Media, media, media. We just can’t get enough of the media. Social media are media, Newspapers are media; the radio, the tv, the cinema. Media are everywhere and we consume them almost for the same amount of time we spend in our office: according to A. Guttmann’ study, Time Spent With Digital vs. Traditional Media in the U.S. 2011-2025, published in August 2023, U.S. citizens in 2022 consumed digital media 7 hours per day on average, against four hours on traditional media, meaning tv, radio, cinema, and print publishing. Needless to say, as the consumption of digital media grows exponentially, the consumption of traditional media falls in a specular fashion. This study also provides a forecast of how numbers could change in 2024 and 2025, and it looks like we are not going to do any better.
Books are media too, even though we don’t treat them as such: we buy them (because they are pretty), they rest in peace untouched on our shelves for dusty years. And yet, our teachers told us to read and insisted so much in giving out reading advice. They would give us summer readings, push us to look for our favourite genres, read aloud great literature with emphasis and care, but we can’t help it: we are tired, our eyelids weigh like a thousand pounds and we just want not to struggle more than what we already do in our day-to-day lives. But everybody tells us that reading improves our writing, our memory, our sleep and our mood; then, why do we find it so hard to open that block of paper every day?
Of course, this is not the case for everyone. A study reported by penguin.co.uk says that an average UK citizen reads 12,5 books per year. It is more or less one book per month. However, if you opened this article, you must be looking for advice on how to start the healing journey for your inner reader, who looks a bit off, but maybe only needs a little help. Don’t you worry, everybody has been there, and there is no shame in saying that you haven’t been able to open a book for months or even for years. We do not want to leave you alone on this journey, and also we’d love to give another little reason to listen to our suggestions for the Book of The Month, because we really did our best to share our favourite English-speaking literature.
Ludwig commits to share with the audience tips and curiosity about English, and it dedicated a monthly column to books because the team believes in the power of good literature not only to help you write better and expand your vocabulary, but also to share good values, develop a good taste in media, spark up stimulating debates and amplify your critical thinking.
So, here’s my take on the importance of books, after a long journey to recover my love and appreciation for them. I swear I will keep it as original and less-patronising as possible. But before I reveal to you the backstages of my reading-healing journey, let’s just wrap up the reasons why books could still be the most powerful media to connect with yourself and forget for once the doom-scrolling bedtime ritual.
The reader’s privilege
Books can change lives. They are burnt at squares to manifest dissent, they lead new movements, or they become illegal. Once upon a time, being a reader and a lower-class member of society was a very revolutionary and punk thing to do. In the beginning of the novel The Red and the Black by Stendhal, the young protagonist hides from his miller father to read his precious novel, because the patriarch would consider it ‘a waste of time’. Black enslaved people would be forbidden to learn how to write and read because it would have been both a distraction from, you know, being enslaved, and also it would lead to the path of emancipation.
Despite what we may think today, books have always been a luxury. Yesterday they were very expensive and reading was a prerogative of upper-classes, today they require an amount of time that most people can’t afford between work, chores, social life and personal care. Despite that, I believe that everybody deserves books, and the key to spreading awareness on reading benefits could be behind the corner.
What if I don’t Like reading, but I want to?
“I am a slow reader”, “when I go to bed, I’m too tired to engage my brain this much”, “reading is tiring for my overworked brain”, “I don’t know anything about books”.
There is this misconception around that if you want to start reading, you have to start from the classics. A good classic is indeed enriching and nourishing for your personal culture and vocabulary, but it is not necessary to start off your journey from there. It is like starting your fitness journey by running a marathon every week. No one says you can’t do it, but it may discourage those who just need some good time or vibing with a nice story. Classics can be tough to get at first, either because they use a formal register, words we don’t use anymore, references to other classics you know nothing about, or concepts that require our full concentration. I have to make a disclaimer here: many classics have very simple language and feel-good stories. Those ones could definitely be a nice start.
The princess and the pandemic
When I graduated, I had a full reader’s block. It was during the pandemic, I had to wait until the end of summer for the Master’s degree to start, no job nor social activities to attend. I thought that It would have been the perfect moment to gather my unread classics and start off my reading journey. Yet, every day I woke up I couldn’t open a single book, I couldn’t read a single paragraph. I was frustrated. I had this marvellous paperback of Tender is the Night, but I ended up doing literally anything but starting it.
After one month of bread baking and work-out schedules, my eyes fell on a small novel my cousin gifted me for a birthday or a Christmas -I still can’t recall- left alone on the top of a pile of filed documents, covered in dust in the corner of my bedroom. I grabbed it and looked at its shabby watercolour cover. The naive title suggested that it had to be a sort of cautionary tale about how important it was to go to therapy, in the form of a metaphorical journey of a princess that fell in love with an abusive prince but started off a journey in the world of dreams thanks to a magic owl (?).
I must say, the underlying message was good: if somebody you love is being abusive, seek help and work on your self esteem. I might have over-simplified it, but the point is that the book was very, very ugly. It was very short, no more than two hundred pages, the metaphors were incredibly banal and the prose was like a too-complicated recipe done with the wrong ingredients at the half of the time required because you’re too hungry to wait. I literally read it in less than two days, giggling and shaking my head on every paragraph.
It was fun. I spent the next two weeks grabbing all the ugly short books I found in my childhood’s library: by the end of the month, I read fifteen books. I felt disgust, hilarity, hopelessness, confusion, enjoyment, I even found some good stuff here and there, but by the end of that period, I felt the lust for something better. I opened my Tender is the Night Penguin paperback and I enjoyed majestic prose and a perfectly balanced plot in a way that has never happened to me before. I had to slowly enter it, I had to start off very easily to remind myself of the joys of a good classic. From that day on, I started looking for short narratives to alternate my classics with, without prioritising “what looks useful for my skills”, but looking for “books that looked fun”.
With this, I am not saying that we should dump hardcover, long and engaging readings just because “they look too hard”. My piece of advice is that we have to consider reading as a journey. Find your own way, don’t listen to those who tell you “you’re not a good reader unless you read this or that”: the time for enjoying elaborated, demanding texts will come, and your need for good literature might be hiding behind a process of demystification of the act of reading. Trust the process and remember: a good reader makes a good writer, and this is almost mathematical. But if you want to become a good writer, then that’s another article–stay tuned, it is on the way—.
And, if you feel like trying, but you want to skip the ‘ugly book’ part and maybe read something undemanding but still very beautiful, in our book of the month list there are a few nice ones. I personally recommend The Secret Sharer, Daisy Miller, Eureka Street.
Books are your friends, not your enemies.
