On Reading

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
-W. Somerset Maugham

The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable. Of course, there are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment. We are reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get through them without tedium. Such books we read with resignation rather than with alacrity. But that is not the sort of reading I have in mind. The books I have in mind will help you neither to get a degree nor to earn your living, but they will help you to live more fully. That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.

The "you" I address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain leisure and who would like to read books. I do not address the bookworm. He can find his own way. His curiosity leads him along many unfrequented paths and he gathers delight in the discovery of half-forgotten excellence. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have. 


Every man is his own best critic. Whatever the learned say about a book, however unanimous they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you, it is no business of yours. You who read are the final judge of the value to you of the book you are reading. None of us are exactly like anyone else, and it would be unreasonable to suppose that the books that have meant a great deal to me should be precisely those that will mean a great deal to you. No one is under an obligation to read poetry or fiction or the miscellaneous literiture. He must read them for pleasure, and who can claim that what pleases one man must necessarily please another?
 
Pleasure in itself is a great good, all pleasure, but its consequences may be such that the sensible person eschews certain varieties of it. Nor need pleasure be gross and sensual. They are wise in their generation who have discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the most enduring. It is well to acquire the habit of reading. After you have passed the prime of life, there are few sports in which you can engage to your own satisfaction, and there are few games that you can play without someone to play with you. Reading suffers from no such disadvantages. There is no other occupation which you can more easily take up at any moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when other calls press upon you; there is no other amusement that can be more easily obtained in these happy days of public libraries and cheap editions. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. Almost all, I say, for I would not go so far as to pretend that to read a book will assuage the pangs of hunger; but half a dozen good detective stories and a hot-water bottle will enable anyone to snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head. But who is going to acquire the habit of reading for reading's sake, if he is bidden to read books?