True Purpose of Reading
To my mind, the only sensible reason for reading anything is because we enjoy it or hope to enjoy it. Of course, pleasure covers a whole variety of feelings and shades of feeling. But it is my strongest belief about reading that one should read only what one likes and because one likes it. I am talking, of course, about our private reading. When we are studying special subjects or working for examinations, we obviously have to read a good deal that we would not choose to read in other circumstances. It may seem odd to have to insist that one should only read because one likes it, but people read for such a queer variety of reasons. There are people who read a book, not because they enjoy the book, but because they want to be able to say that they have read it. They want to be in the Swim. Ten to one, when they read a book for those reasons, they only skip through it, because all they really want to do is to be able to talk as if they had read it. There are people who set themselves down to read a book because they think it will do them good. They make a duty of it, a kind of penance. Sometimes they go so far as to set themselves so many pages at a time. If it is some kind of technical book which they are reading in order to improve their knowledge, it is good and good. But if it is a novel or a poem, or any part of what we call English Literature, then the person who is reading it in this way is wasting his or her time.
