Time Well Spent: The Value of Reading
Why read books?
As Christians, we know it’s essential to read the Good Book, God’s Word. But why read other books? How might they be valuable for the Christian life? After all, where’s the time? We lead busy lives. We need to prepare for a meeting, visit the dentist, arrange dinner, throw in the laundry, chase our kids, race from sporting event to church event, and walk the dog. Why spend our precious time reading books?
In a culture that prizes efficiency, we struggle to answer that question. In Whit Stillman’s classic film Metropolitan, one of the main characters declares, “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking.”
Unfortunately, the character seems to miss the point of reading entirely. We might dismiss his remark as a satirical aside, but this sentiment perseveres especially in the age of AI. Why not simply ask ChatGPT for the synopsis of a novel? That way you don’t have to waste your time reading it.
But the “wasted” time is the point. How many of us would say we “wasted” time with Jane Eyre? Samwise Gamgee? Laura Ingalls? Pip? The Pevensies? If anything, we long for more time with them, because through them we saw the world anew. We practiced living the stories of our own lives with more courage, integrity, and hope.
You see, we don’t read books to mine them for information. We don’t walk away from a great book, even a great book of nonfiction, thinking, “I’m so glad I have processed these facts.” A book is not a data-purveyor, and we are not robots. It is a giver of experience, an expression of meaning, and we are image-bearers who long for experience and meaning.
Meaning, however, is hairier and less immediately useful than information. Meaning implies contemplation and interpretation. By comparison, information tempts with its apparent certainty and practicality. Meaning can feel ambiguous and slippery.
But every day we are tasked with making sense of and acting in the story of our lives. We must relearn patience, choose wisely, love well. To do so, we recall the truths of Scripture, but we also draw on the stories we know and love. In this way, reading great books helps us grow in virtue. It’s not only the characters we meet and the trials they navigate that form us, but the steady, quiet dedication of reading itself—of sitting down, of putting the phone away, of saying wait to the endless, tyrannical demands of the now, of trusting that there are some things that are worth doing slowly, some things that are worth wasting time on.
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
This is why we believe so strongly in the value of reading at Clapham. This is why, from the small to the tall, we sit our students at a table of great books with great ideas and let them feast. It’s not fast work, it’s not flashy work, but it’s work that lasts. When our students attend to these great books and narrate them, they relive the stories; they enlarge their souls. They practice the work of living well with Peter Rabbit, with Winnie the Pooh, with the March sisters, with Huck Finn, with Sherlock Holmes, with Elizabeth Bennet.
But reading is not just training in virtue. In reading, there is serious joy—the kind of joy that blooms over long swaths of time. This is why C.S. Lewis advocated for reading a handful of books over and over, rather than cramming in as many books as you can. The joy of reading does not lie in accumulating knowledge but in coming to a place you thought you knew, only to find it mysteriously changed.
That’s my experience now rereading Anna Karenina, one of my favorite novels. The characters I thought I knew, the novel I thought I had pinned down, have shifted. But maybe that’s because I have changed. I have had children, moved across the country, and lived a dense wedge of life. Now I am meeting Anna, Kitty, Levin, and Karenin all over again. Now I am reading a novel that is at once the same and different, rather like my own life.
"In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches."
Our hope at Clapham is that students would learn to love reading, and that the books they read here would be friends they make and return to again, perhaps with their own children. The life of reading is one that requires diligence and temperance, one that rewards with glowing insights and enduring joys. It is a life that draws us to the unplumbable meaning and delight of God’s story he has written for us in Creation and in His Word. And that story we will read and reread, wasting time for all eternity.
Kelsey Peterson began teaching Rhetoric and Spanish in Clapham’s Upper School this year. She has been teaching at the university and secondary school level for nearly ten years. She and her husband Ryan and their two daughters, Dorothy (currently in Explorers I) and Marianne (wishing she were already in Explorers I), attend All Souls Anglican Church. You can usually find them haunting the bookstores around the area with coffees and baked goods in hand.