The Importance of Reading Good Books

I must confess that I read far less than I actually should. Not that this is an awfully shocking confession to make, especially since it has become an unfortunately well known fact that teenagers are reading less and less for pleasure. It is a conclusion that anyone can derive from personal experience without the assistance of the various dry research studies that have been conducted on the matter. Just look at shopping malls and classrooms. You’d be hard pressed to find ten or more kids investing themselves in a piece of serious literature.

It is very likely that teenagers, mediated by an array of screens, are consuming more words than any generation ever has in the past. But these words are often delivered in scraps and tiny fragments, whether in the form of clickbait headlines, article excerpts, text messages or any of the billion notifications from every app on our phones. Yes, it is true that millions of kids have burrowed into the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings books. But then what happens when they hit adolescence? The books start to get larger and denser, and, as a result, too daunting. Of course, these same teenagers are also extremely busy, caught up in a whirlwind of school work, relationships, personal ambitions and other channels of entertainment, from music, television and films to social media. It’s as if there is virtually no time to anchor one’s self within the pages of a great novel. Except there is, if you actually try. With this predicament in mind, I made it a goal for myself to read at least four to five books over the summer.

Surprisingly, I managed to read eight complete books, far surpassing my original goal. I read a wide variety of different texts, all of which piqued my interests in different ways. The post-modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” served as a huge inspiration and guide to writing my own poetry. Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” provided profound insight into the subtle propaganda of American mainstream media while the complex, mathematical prose of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” thoroughly confused my poor 16-year-old brain. These are all wonderful and important books that deserve to be discussed in depth. However, one book caught my attention more than any other: Albert Camus’ magnum opus, “The Stranger.” I know, it’s a bit of a cliché for a teenager to stumble upon “The Stranger,” or any Camus work for that matter, and have their worldview shattered in drastic ways. But clichés exist because they hold certain inalienable truths, and I’d be damned if “The Stranger” isn’t a brilliant and profound novel.

The stranger of the novel is Meursault, a young, indifferent French Algerian man who leads a feckless, doomed and uncaring existence. Beginning with the death of Meursault’s mother and ending with his sentencing for the murder of an Arab man, the novel navigates the world entirely through Meursault’s detached perspective. He seems to care very little about his mother and doesn’t even bother to inquire the details of her death. The day after a passionless funeral, he carries on with his life. He goes swimming, starts a meaningless affair and strolls off to see a comedy film. He interacts with two of his neighbors. One is abusive to their pet dog, the other is abusive towards his romantic partners. But none of this seems to phase Meursault, who remains chillingly objective in his assessment of these events. A week later, he murders a man. When questioned by the judge about his motives, he can’t come up with anything. Meursault doesn’t do this to avoid punishment. He legitimately didn’t have a clear motivation. Nothing mattered to him until the very end ,and even then it was him eagerly awaiting his execution.

The theme and outlook of “The Stranger” are highly indicative of the philosophy of the absurd, which Camus played an instrumental role in developing. Having only heard bits and pieces of absurdism in the past, reading “The Stranger” was my formal introduction. I was equally appalled and in agreement with Meursault’s detached approach to life. In many ways, I thought Meursault had gotten it all figured out. It was as if he had completely seen through the absurdity and pointlessness of living and had relegated himself to the role of the observer, beyond the desires and concerns of our three-dimensional world. I found this to be appealing. After all, I believed my suffering to be a direct result of caring and feeling too much. If I could just become detached like Meursault, nothing in life could bother me anymore. However, I came to the conclusion that such an endeavor is also meaningless, for I am still human and emotional detachment is virtually impossible. And what “The Stranger” ultimately accomplished for me was the realization that the emotional anguish that I treated like a curse eventually turned out to be a blessing. Whenever I write, the depth and intensity of what I feel becomes a gift, a rich source of human experience. As a result, my writing has become more meaningful and my emotional state more stable.

I don’t think Camus intended to frame Meursault as some sort of ideal human being. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. Yes, adhering to absurdism does involve the keen understanding of how absurdly pointless and futile our existence is. But the conclusion that one should derive from this perspective should not be one of extreme resignation and indolence. Actually, it should be one of exaltation, a peerless sense of exuberance that life’s limited and absurd offerings are reasons to consider it valuable. As much as Camus wrote about a stranger, I also found an unexpected friend, someone who elevated my worldview which continues to inform my approach to life, even if it is in disagreement.

That all being said, should students be forced to read over the summer, especially considering how life-changing a great novel can be? I say no. You can’t force teenagers to do anything, really. We’ll just bark back with even stronger refusal. Developing a taste and desire for literature has to come naturally to the individual. However, what a teacher may do is provide a channel where kids may develop a sense of literature’s overall importance to becoming a three-dimensional being. Great teachers are as important to a student’s emotional and moral life as any other spiritual guide is. They should not be sheepish in their conviction in the power of great literature. Creating an interest in reading is as much the teacher’s job as it is the student’s. High school teachers should try to understand where their students live emotionally by engaging in their naïve existential questions, their adolescent fascination with the darker aspects of the human mind and their fear of becoming a responsible, functioning adult. Great books and writers have confronted these problems for centuries. If the teacher can forge a connection between these two things, so that reading is as much a cathartic experience as it is entertainment, then I believe students will dig out a few hours during the summer to have their lives changed just as I have.