Feeling a certain unease is part of the experience of reading a book; there is far more to be learnt from unease than from relief. We could send all the literature of the past to the operating theatre to have it undergo cosmetic surgery, but then it would no longer explain the world to us.
Irene Vallejo, in The Infinite in a Reed: The Invention of the Book in Antiquity and the Birth of the Thirst for Reading
We would all like to live simple, uncomplicated lives. In short, we would like to be happy, whilst being able to avoid the problems that life naturally and inevitably imposes on us. But human life is by its very nature hard, and many of the challenges that arise throughout life are complex. The maths is simple: complex problems require appropriate answers. Reading is one of the few activities that allows us to gain a deep understanding of life’s complexity, to learn and to question ourselves within a safe inner space.
For this reason, I would say that reading is essential. Reading is the greatest tool for learning. Books, as Irene Vallejo would say, explain the world to us and, above all, offer us other perspectives and possibilities.
Stories have always been part of humanity. Since time immemorial, human beings have enjoyed listening to and telling stories, both for entertainment and to teach. But from the moment humanity invented the book, something changed forever. The way we imagine and tell stories changed, as did the way we experience them. Reading was born.
Reading is about experiencing or living through things we often could not do otherwise. As we read, we travel through other times, countries or continents. We journey through different eras and customs. We experience emotions. We discover feelings. In this sense, reading can be a great pleasure.
But reading is more than that. At every stage of life, reading is a form of learning: it introduces new topics and different ways of looking at life and interpreting situations. In childhood, reading stimulates the imagination and helps children to understand the world and their emotions. In adolescence, reading can be a way of accessing information that would otherwise be unavailable. As adults, reading allows us to continue discovering, analysing and challenging social narratives, prejudices and ideologies. As we read, we are finally able to put ourselves in another’s shoes, because we have spent time with them. Reading allows us to revisit emotions we have experienced in our personal lives, which, for reasons of shame or otherwise, we have not been able to access; and to open ourselves up to questioning. In a book, we can hear the words we needed to hear from a partner, a sibling, a father or a mother; we can shed tears we didn’t even know were hidden within us. Through stories, we learn life lessons and gain the courage to take the first step towards a better life.
In this sense, reading enables us to undertake important personal development, because it requires time and reflection. And, in times of great social challenges, reading allows us to broaden our knowledge, cultivate tolerance, nurture hope, realise that sometimes we need to break away from certain values; and find solutions.
In a speech given at the Hay Festival in the UK in May 2026, the author Katherine Rundell brilliantly summed up what reading is, and what the pleasure and necessity of reading are all about:
“Reading gives me real bodily joy (Rundell said), it is my favourite thing and I have written a lot about the necessity of pleasure in education, (…) about how it is a hallmark of a whole education to find ways to show that reading can give access to an inexhaustible source of delight.
But I also worry that sometimes we are limiting the meaning of the term pleasure.
(Pleasure) does not always mean fun.
Learning is a strange and painful experience. It is a struggle and a frustration and epiphanies are rare.
So, it is not pleasure in a simple sense, like a great glass of wine is a pleasure. We need to talk to young people about reading for pleasure but also to read to outrun and for justice, reading for emancipation, intellectual freedom and to have the strength to fight in the arenas of the mind.
These are dark days. We need tough people and we need stamina and a huge range of knowledge; and (we need) people who have the capacity to synthesize fast enough and to understand what is being done to us. (…) While it is a joy for millions of us, for all of us, reading is a form of power. We need to read for power.”
Reading should not be seen as a school obligation or a mere pastime, nor, at the other extreme, as something done only by the educated. But indeed, reading is something that is learnt. Reading demands a lot from us. Firstly, reading demands time in a society where we no longer have time. Reading demands patience. We do not always manage to understand or engage with an author’s writing in the first few paragraphs or pages. Reading requires us to open ourselves up to the world, to other ideas and to our own inner demons. The act of reading strengthens our knowledge and enables us to make connections and find meaning between life experiences, society, other people or even across different disciplines.
The story of a book is not limited to the story the author has written, just as reading cannot be confined to the time we have devoted to a particular work. Within every story there are many stories, and there is also the story of each one of us, which we build step by step, idea by idea.
It seems clear to me that, in schools, throughout the entire learning cycle of children, dedicated spaces for reading must be created. Introducing or addressing reading within the context of language learning is not enough, and may not even be appropriate. Learning a language, writing and reading are distinct activities. Reading deserves special attention. And, as adults, we need to set aside space and time for reading because reading is about knowing, understanding, questioning and setting oneself free.
Translated from Portuguese into English and French with DeepL.com (free version)
