What is the use of reading? | Literature

They have turned us into readers. They have profoundly transformed our knowledge of the world and have contributed decisively to our social and cultural formation. Two very different scenes, starring children, talk about the very close relationship that is established between readers, books and life. Written twenty years apart, the two present reading as a refuge from the world of adults, a haven in which to build an identity and grow. The first one stars Matilde, an extraordinary girl who had the misfortune of being born into a mediocre family, who despises her. At the age of three, since he can’t find any books at home – there is only a cookbook – he escapes every afternoon to the library, where he devours everything he can get his hands on. Her favorite character is Dickens’ Pickwick because it makes her laugh. The second takes place in a closer space: a coastal town where Anna K. lives, a beautiful girl, the result of an incestuous relationship. One strange day, Anna K., terrified, climbs the stairs and tries to read to understand everything that moves inside her, without order or concert. Anna K. will not return to the library, but her life, tinged with melodrama, will never be the same again. In these two scenes, the protagonists of Matilda, by Roald Dahl, and Anna K., by Martí Rosselló, reveal with great grace the fascination that reading causes in human beings, a species that, as Irene Vallejo reminds me in Manifesto por la lectura, is so fragile that it needs the word as a life preserver for the shipwreck.

In recent years, several studies have appeared that highlight, once again, the importance of the book in education and culture, as well as its therapeutic and social value. These are works that add nuances and variations to the already classic studies on the history of reading by Alberto Manguel, Gugliemo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, and Martyn Lyons, which take stock of 6,000 years of written letters in the Western world. In the 21st century, the central topic of reflection has undoubtedly been the appearance of the digital book and the first generative writing platforms. One of the most shared observations concerns the materiality of the support. For the first time, we have a type of reading, digital, that separates the object from the text: the reader can no longer identify, from the support, the discourse. On the screen we do not see how the text is arranged, the textual architecture disappears. This implies a different, hypertextual, more fragmented and scattered reading practice.

Roger Chartier, a Book, reading and written culture. Brief oral dictionary (2021), warns of the risk that digital reading would supplant the reading of paper books. In his analysis he tries to understand the logic that regulates certain gestures and , taking into account both their material dimension and the social representations that have been made of them. Chartier makes us see the need, which we have as readers, to pay attention to the shape of the book, the layout of the page, the binding or the design. It makes us focus on the textual architecture of the book, which implies a certain relationship between the parts that compose it (chapter, paragraph, sentence).

The return to the material dimension of reading can also be related to the need to be present in an increasingly virtual world. Thus, books can be seen as “bodies” from which we relate, think and interact with the environment. Bodies thanks to which we do an activity that is both on the sidelines, or inappropriate, such as reading. in the book Reading culture and educationedited by Jordi Garcia Farrero and Maria Marcos Fernàndez, reading is related to forms of pedagogical resistance. Raúl Navarro, Karine Rivas and Jordi Gracia emphasize that it must be seen as an antidote to the crisis of narrativity and the homogenization of subjectivity that affects, above all, young people. Based on the observations of (in Sin relato, 2025) and Mark Fisher (in Capitalist realism: no hi ha alternativa?, 2018), they consider reading to be an inappropriate practice. It is because it demands isolation, deceleration and concentration, characteristics contrary to the logic of late capitalism. For this reason, it can help combat the feeling of “reflexive impotence” that many young people experience and that hinders their training.

Flexibility in classrooms and teaching methods promotes free and voluntary reading

One of the main effects we experience when reading is disconnection, in a double sense: with respect to oneself and with respect to the world. This feel-good effect can help us develop empathy. The anthropologist Michèle Petit, a The art of reading in times of crisispublished at the beginning of the financial crisis, recalls critical moments, caused by wars or economic problems, in which there was an increase in reading. The various experiences he collects, which take place in different parts of the world, allow him to underline the therapeutic values ​​of reading and highlight its anthropological dimension. In difficult times, readers found in reading a space of fictional and symbolic mediation that allowed them to “exist”, to build a place for themselves. More recently, the relationship between reading and health has been the focus ofThe gift of readingby the linguist Sebastià Serrano. It tells the story of a real case that happened in the 19th century: the protagonist, Claude, recovers from a stroke and recovers the correct articulation of speech thanks to reading, in therapeutic sessions given by a specialist in diction who works for the Comédie Française.

Inseparable from the mass literacy process initiated in the Western world in the 19th century, reading has an obvious political dimension. The sociologist Joaquín Rodríguez coined, in 2022, the term lectocracy to refer to the exercise of reading as a critical foundation that makes it possible to undermine deep-rooted convictions and combat misinformation. This practice moves away from a purely domesticating view of reading learning and involves understanding it as a truly democratizing experience. Along these lines, the pedagogue Mar Esteve, a The school, house of readingremembers that active reading includes the possibility of moral construction and the practice of hospitality.

In 1992, the writer and teacher Daniel Pennac published Like a novela highly influential essay that was interpreted as a plea for freedom in the way of reading. Based on his experience as a (bad) reader, the author desacralized the book through a decalogue of readers’ rights, which included options such as skipping pages, not finishing books, or reading anywhere. It is a decalogue that, thirty-four years later, no one would question, given the flexibility that has taken place both in classrooms and in the diversification of teaching methods, which privilege the option of free and voluntary reading. The pedagogue Joan Portell and the neuroscientist Michel Desmurget have collected various didactic proposals a do we read How to make enthusiastic readers i Make them read! More books and fewer screens. Both defend the public usefulness of reading for pleasure, while denouncing the consequences that the decline in the reading habit has on school performance.

In the West, the golden age of books, explains Martyn Lyons to A history of reading and writingtook place between 1880 and 1930. It was during this period that the first massively literate generation gained access to books. This access implied, however, a hierarchy based on reader choices. The readings of the heroes and heroines of the time serve us to identify them socially. So, for example, the reading tastes of The fat girl (1917), by Santiago Rusiñol, daughter of a freethinker from Gràcia, are antagonistic to Zeni’s Vals (1935), by Francesc Trabal, son of an industrial bourgeois. While the pamphlet novels, which have a sentimental theme, will turn La Niña into a bland and ridiculous Madame Bovary, choosing Goethe allows Zeni to get closer to Joana, with the certainty of who knows that choosing her implies a sure courtship. In Labor literature, reading books, recommending them and exchanging them is an unequivocal mark of social identity. These exchanges, moreover, take place in fairly exclusive cultural spaces — Vera, another of the girls Zeni dated, goes to the academy library knowing that “tradition stated that a girl who read twenty-three books there, was not left to dress as saints.”

Against an elitist view of the book, and of reading, paperback editions, started by Penguin in 1935, and book clubs were encouraged. The latter, in the sense of informal meetings to discuss a book, were developed in the nineties and have become popular in recent years. Emulating the television programs hosted by Bernard Pivot, Joaquín Soler Serrano, Emili Manzano or Anna Guitart, the clubs allow socializing what Montserrat Roig called “the shared vice of reading” and create reading communities, which can be linked to specific themes or groups. In this sense, they involve an expansion of the spaces where we read and can be related to other collective reading initiatives, such as those collected by Thibault Le Page in Read together (2026), inspired by artistic practices, or the Lire pour Relier platform, created by Régine Detambel during the covid pandemic, a volunteer group of readers who, advised by psychologists, read literary works to inmates in residences. For its part, the National Art Museum of Catalonia organizes the Reading Parties, which combine a part of silent reading inside the museum with a talk about art and mental health. By gaining space, diversifying, and taking root within all of us, reading emancipates us and helps us understand the vital meaning of a culture.