“I like books about books,” the woman ahead of me at the library book sale said, as she picked up a cozy paperback with a watercolor painting of a stack of books on its cover. In that moment, I bonded with a stranger. In rapid-fire fashion, she and I exchanged titles of books about books that we had recently read. Monica Wood’s new novel How to Read a Book, Marcus Suzak’s The Book Thief, and Emily Henry’s Beach Read, to start with. Just that morning I had finished Shannon Reed’s Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out (Hanover Square Press, 2024). I picked Reed’s book up from the new releases shelf and checked it out of the library. The bright blue cover had an illustration of haphazardly stacked books, with silhouettes of people reading on the stack. I didn’t even bother to read the cover blurb because I will, indeed, judge a book by its cover.
I am a capital-R Reader. Why We Read was my one-hundredth read of 2024, according to my StoryGraph statistics. I will easily read around 130 books in 2024, as I do most years. And, like Shannon Reed, I read books across an incredibly wide set of genres. I can just as frequently be found with a rom-com novel as I am a piece of classic literature. I also have a soft spot for nonfiction books about shipwrecks and mutinies.
For a book nerd like me, Reed’s light little collection of essays was exactly what I needed to make me feel less alone in the world. We are often inundated with statistics claiming the average American owns only fifteen books, or that they read fewer than a dozen books a year. For those of us who are likely to read a dozen books in a single month, these statistics can feel isolating, and we reach out to other readers on BookTube and BookTok to find community. And like Reed, we often find ourselves asking, why do we read?
Reed starts with that question in this book, but she also asks, “Where does it begin? Is it about more than just words on a page? Does reading have to stop at novels?” The answer to that last one is a definite no, since she has included an entire essay about reading cookbooks. Reed is examining not only what draws us to the written page but what keeps us there. She’s also examining our preconceived ideas about books, why we may try to force our way through Moby-Dick and shun those who read Amish Romance novels. (Did you know that’s a whole genre unto itself?)
Reed, who also writes for McSweeney’s, explores these topics in a variety of ways. She waxes on comedically throughout the book, as she reminisces about reading in the back of the car as a child and reading in the back of the library as a college student.
Reed includes quite a few McSweeney’s-style list essays that poke fun at common literary tropes, while also emphasizing the patterns avid readers secretly love. Perhaps my favorite list essay in the series is “Signs You May Be a Character in a Popular Children’s Book” (Do you wear pants?) but as someone who has read all of Twilight and far too many YA romance novels, I also really enjoyed “Signs You May Be an Adult Character in a YA Novel” (You’re good at cookies).
There is a wonderful lack of literary snobbery in Reed’s writing. She speaks just as eloquently about The Monster at the End of this Book as she does Armistead Maupin and Jane Austen. Reed establishes early on that all reading is valuable reading. Many of Reed’s essays are titled “Because . . .” in response to that question of why we read. In “Because We Had To,” she explores the books we have to read in school, and the books we feel we have to read to be part of a literary society. Reed writes, “. . . bringing students back to enjoying assigned reading is a true pleasure of the job.” She carries that same pleasure into this book, allowing readers permission to truly enjoy reading. Reading should be fun and reading should inspire us. It shouldn’t, even in Reed’s classrooms, feel like an assignment.
Reed also chronicles an all-too-familiar experience for readers in her essay “Because Failure is Most Definitely Not an Option” as she walks us through the experience of being caught in a lie about a book we only pretended to have read. Among the unspoken rules of readers is the expectation that you will read certain authors. Reed’s raw exploration of the embarrassment she felt at having to admit she hadn’t read The Great Gatsby after making a joke about the circus (she’s also not clear on why she thought it was about a circus) is relatable and a beautiful lesson for us all. If we, as Reed suggests, accept ourselves as the readers we are instead of trying to be the readers we think we should be, we save ourselves a lot of embarrassment.
In “Because I Wanted Free Pizza,” Reed explores the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program that fed so many of us greasy pizza in the ’80s and ’90s in exchange for reading books and reading them fast. For those of us—myself included—who were already reading at a fast pace, this program may have, instead of inspiring us to read more, inspired us to absorb less of what we read. Reed’s experience so perfectly mirrors my own, as I swiftly plowed through pages of Baby-Sitters Club books and sped to the final scene of each Nancy Drew novel so I could earn that coveted black olive personal pan pizza. The waitresses always looked at me funny when I ordered olive, but I didn’t notice, because I was already reading toward the next pizza.
Reading is a hobby, and it should be fun. It shouldn’t be an assignment or a chore. It shouldn’t be a thing we do because we have to or a thing we do solely because it is good for us. Reading is meant to inspire us, to teach us who we are, and to entertain us. Why We Read reminds us not only of where we began as readers but also where we could go if we release our inhibitions and allow ourselves to simply enjoy reading. Reed reminds us we don’t need to take our reader selves so seriously. We can simply have fun with books. Whether it is crime novels or romance novels, nonfiction history texts, or cookbooks, we should find the books we love, and unabashedly read those books.
Not only did Why We Read inspire me to read more and think more about who I am as a reader, it also provided me a new reading list from the books Reed mentions. Books I would never have considered reading, that Reed spoke of in such a way that I must now check them out. After reading her essay “Because it’s Fun” I absolutely must find out what she found so perplexing in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo!
