BTT: Why You Read

 ((Booking Through Thursday is hosted @ http://btt2.wordpress.com))

This week’s question, suggested by Janet, asks:

I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”

To what extent does this describe you?

Hmmm… My life isn’t “insufficient”. I have had a decent life. Certainly not a perfect one, and it hasn’t always been a happy one, but it’s not been a bad one.

Sure, there are times when I read to ‘escape’. Sometimes life is stressful, and you just want to take yourself off somewhere else for a while. Books afford me that luxury.

But, for the most part, I read because I love to learn. Given that I read more nonfiction than fiction most of the time, it’s pretty evident that I read to soak up knowledge and to keep my brain healthy.

I read because I love knowing that I’m not alone in this world — that others face the same things I do, and yet they survive; they make it through. Reading gives me hope.

I’m blessed to be able to read… and to be able to own so many wonderful books!

So, nope — I don’t necessarily agree with the quote above.

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