Abstract

Why do you read?

This paper will explore why we read and what we talk about when we talk about reading.
Posing these two questions focuses the attention on the individual and the decision of reading.
Reading allows a person to enter, or escape to, a place where they normally would not have
visited. By stepping into a space created when reading, an individual makes a conscious
decision to start questioning his/her viewpoints, subconscious thoughts, and biases, whether
cultural or otherwise. Reading forces a person to enter an uncomfortable place, where they
start learning how to question. The reader as a result changes and comes out in a new body, or
at the very least a new skin. A reader “likes” or “dislikes” a book points to the level of
resistance.

To support the thesis, the paper seeks to locate the individual reasons and reactions to
reading. I hope to suggest, using anecdotal evidence, that reading is equal to, as Ovid posits
in the Metamorphoses, “bodies changed into new form.” The argument recognizes that
reading occurs at different levels, and change happens by varying degrees. Transformation is
not a linearly identical case rather an organic, fluid continuum. In addition to the transformative
nature of reading, the paper will also discuss the sharing of reading, and how that transforms
two individuals simultaneously. This sharing and transmitting of what one has read refashions
the relationship between the reader and the recipient. Equally significant is how reading
reforms the space between the reader and the recipient.