Reading is Overrated

Too many people will have you believe that our very humanity resides in books, says the Guardian, and that's reading a little too much into it.

From the post...

Let's take the following, by way of almost random example, from Charles Kingsley: "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book." Gosh. Any living man? Any book? Nothing else can compete? Flowers? Sunsets? Palladian villas? Pastrami sandwiches with extra pickles? Rubbish. One remembers Norman Mailer's definition of a "conservative" as one who, given a choice between saving the life of a man and that of a tree, will ask to view the tree and to meet the man before making his decision. You have to look at what is in front of your nose, after all. It's not too much to ask.

And then we have this, from Somerset Maugham: "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life." Well, almost all? I wonder which miseries reading is a refuge from, and which not? And if it is such an escape, are we not likely to doubt that what we were protected from was not a misery, but an inconvenience or an occasional source of bad temper? I suspect that a good definition of "misery" might well be "pain so acute that even reading will not assuage it". I'd be surprised if reading provided a "refuge" from the pains of toothache, colic, or childbirth, the deaths of loved ones, the decline into dementia, the experience of war, famine, or grinding poverty, or the relegation of Coventry City FC.