Reading as character building

Karen Swallow Prior

I have yet to read Karen Swallow Prior's book On Reading Well, but I did find an interview with her on the web that I found interesting. She argues that reading builds character, or at least can build character. It depends upon what we read, how carefully we read it and how well we digest what we read.

"What we read contributes to virtue when we read timeless works that convey universal human experiences that transcend time, place, and social position," she says. "In the book, I show how we can learn about diligence from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, patience from Jane Austen's Persuasion, justice from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities — and much more."

Watching the PBS series The Great American Read I was struck by how often those people interviewed to promote one novel or another spoke of the virtue conveyed through that particular novel. It wasn't just an entertaining story. It was a story with a good message, a story that teaches something good to its readers.

I recall one woman saying that reading a good novel was a better way to work through one's problems than going to a therapist. It may also do more to make you a better person than listening to any sermon. A novel places you in the mind of another person, putting your feet into that person's moccasins, so to speak. Just the act of viewing things from another person's point of view can make you a better, more sensitive person.

Can movies do the same thing? Well, yes, at least up to a certain point. Movies, however, deal more  with images than with words, and never mind the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. In reality, words carry more lasting impact. Last Satuday at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg I heard Roy Peter Clark, author of The Art of X-ray Reading, say that if you add up all the words in the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer and a few other notable pieces of writing, you come up with fewer than a thousand words. Yet no picture could mean as much or convey as much as those words.