Get smart

Books should make you smarter than you are.

Richard Ford, quoted in The Writer's Library

Richard Ford

Often we read books not to get smarter but simply to be entertained. We are more interested in emotion — thrills, excitement, romance, laughter, sentimentality — than knowledge. We used to read textbooks for information, most of it quickly forgotten. Now we want a good time.

Yet just as we learned more from those textbooks than we think we did, so entertaining novels may be teaching us more than we realize. Even a murder mystery, especially if it's any good, can make us smarter. How do detectives solve crimes? What clues do autopsies provide? What drives ordinary people to commit murder? Even after we have forgotten the plot and the identity of the murderer, we may remember a little something about crime-solving.

We get smarter in small increments, which is why it took so many years to earn a diploma, after which we still knew next to nothing, as we soon discovered. And little by little the books we read do make us smarter, even though we may not realize it.

Some books, especially the nonfiction variety, are read for the very purpose of making us smarter. We want to know how to lose weight, how to make home repairs, what other parts of the world are like and so on. Yet I am convinced that fiction makes us smarter, as well. Why else would they make us read so much of it in school?

Richard Ford, a few pages after the comment quoted above, says something else just as wise: "The whole worth of literature is that it's trying to show us we're less distinct from each other than we thought we were." That, in a nutshell, is how reading makes us smarter.

When we read stories by black authors, white authors, Asian authors, South American authors, Scandinavian authors, African authors or whatever we find characters who, however different from us they seem, have so much in common with us. We have the same feelings, the same desires, the same pains, the same heartaches, the same joys as the people we read about. Their stories become our stories in one way or another. And that knowledge, reinforced in one book after another, makes us smarter.