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In today’s episode, we are talking all about the benefits of reading. We discuss why people don’t read now and what makes reading physical books independently so different than reading on a screen. We talk about what it means to be aliterate and why we should be a people of the book as Christians. Join us for a great conversation on why reading is so important, and get motivated to start your reading habit!

S2E7 – Is it biblical to want to create a life you love? What does the Bible say about pleasure? – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are focusing on part 1 of our series, which is about creating a life we love and cultivating our hearts for God. Before we think about how to create a life we love, we have to figure out if we even should. Is it biblical to create a life we love? What does the Bible say about pleasure? We are going to be looking at some history and then turning our focus to the theology of pleasure in the Bible. Spoiler: Pleasure isn't evil. In this show, I'll explain why. https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/is-it-biblical-to-want-to-create-a-life-you-love-what-does-the-bible-say-about-pleasure/ Get a copy of our FREE guide to creating a life you love here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/0398c49016 – Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hey Everyone and Welcome to A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. I’m Cayce Fletcher and this is Season 1 Episode 13. Today, we are going to be focusing on a habit that all of us probably feel like we should do, but a few of us actually do. There’s a lot of guilt and heavy feelings of ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda, but I’m not gonna.’ Today, I’m going to give you some tips and tricks to cut through all of that noise and gunk and just focus on creating a practice that will renew your mind and help you cultivate a life you love.

What is that habit? A habit that could promise so much?

Well, it’s the habit of reading. Now wait! Don’t skip over the podcast yet, because I’m going to give you some insights into something that will be revolutionary in your personal growth. There are so many benefits of reading that will help to change your life.

On the blog, I wrote a post about morning routines. In it, I described that one of the key habits of successful CEO’s and entrepreneurs is to wake up every day at 5 am. Another key habit of successful people is to read voraciously. Business Insider wrote about the reading habits of 9 of the world’s most successful people, including Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet, and Elon Musk. All had a daily habit of reading. A common theme throughout the habits of all of these people was the tendency to read widely for information to continue growing in their field and their understanding of others. Books were an avenue to bettering themselves and becoming leaders in their field. They were driven and kept that drive even after they made it ‘to the top.’ They reaped the many benefits of reading.

Why People Don’t Read

We currently live in a world that is more literate than ever before. From a young age, people are laser-focused on getting their children to read. There are so many programs, games, apps, preschools, and videos that sing the alphabet song so that kids will know their letters. Schools are pressured to get children reading as soon as possible. Parents make a point to read to their child every day as a toddler and young child, and it’s considered a moral failing if you don’t. It almost seems like kids are born to be able to read – like it’s one of their primary purposes. The next purpose I suppose is to graduate and get a job.

But, at the same time, we hear these facts: In 2022, Gallup released a poll showing a decline in the number of Adults who are reading books in a year. 18% of the population reads no books in a year. The amount of time that the average American spends daily reading is less than 30 minutes – which we know is skewed as an average with some people reading so much that they lift the average for others. In sum, Americans are reading less than ever before. They are not reaping the benefits of reading.

Statistics on our kids and reading are no better. Only 51% of kids are reading for pleasure or for fun. About 27% of 8th graders nationwide are below reading level. And illiteracy is one of the major factors in whether a kid drops out of school or not. For some anecdotal evidence, I can attest that kids don’t read books like they used to even 15 years ago when I was in school. As a reading teacher, I gave students time in class to read a book for fun. Several kids would make a joke that ‘they don’t read’ and that they hadn’t finished a book since 4th grade (I taught 7th graders). You could generally tell the non-readers in behavior and test scores too. At the end of the year during standardized tests, students could bring a book or sleep after the test was done. Some kids would have to sit for over 2 hours depending on how quickly they finished. Even then, they would refuse to read a book. They would rather sit and stare at a wall. It was kind of mind-boggling for me.

See as a kid, I was a voracious reader. I basically never left anywhere without a book. You know the movie where a kid is walking down the hall reading a book? Yeah, that was me. I did that. I read through mostly fantasy and adventure series in Middle School. In high school, I graduated to a diet of mostly Christian books and classics like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Interestingly that growth in reading actually began in my 9th grade year. My youth group had a challenge to read through the New Testament. If we read through the whole thing, we would get a prize. After I did that, my reading kind of took off. By my senior year, I was choosing (out of any book that existed) to write a term paper for my English Course on Anna Karenina (a 1,000-page tome) by Dostoyevsky. When I was figuring out what to do for college, it seemed natural to pick Secondary English Education as a career path. It was a natural extension of my love for reading and writing.

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It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized the whole world that reading can open up for you. This is one of the main benefits of reading. I was talking with a friend recently about how so much of our experiences are wasted on youth. That’s the saying right? “Education is wasted on the young.” Because of curriculum guides and cultural pressure, we read through all of the best things that culture can offer- well hopefully. That mostly depends on the type of schooling you are exposed to. But, as a child, how can we really know how to appreciate East of Eden or The Great Gatsby? Many of our teachers flung great literature at us and then gave us a due date for when it should be done. But, we didn’t care and didn’t have a reason to start caring. This is a recipe for animosity. A recipe for readers to begin to hate reading.

This is the great dichotomy of the modern era. We are all literate but choose to alliterate. We choose to not read. We have access to a whole world of information at our fingertips, but we choose to not interact with it. To not learn and grow. Instead, we just allow social media and the news to be our primary sifters of information, as it spoonfeeds us through scrolling and the algorithm.

We all have the ability to reap the benefits of reading, but many of us actively choose not to.

When I got to college, I began to read even more. College-level English classes generally averaged a book a week, which I read dutifully. But, I also started to dive into other books that I heard about in my classes as well as classics that everyone should read. I will attest that I learned way more through my own reading, as well as the podcasts that I started listening to than I ever did from any one class.

And, why is that? Why would it be that a class – with someone who is piecing together information for you creating a distinct thought or connecting threads through several disparate pieces of information – why would that not be as beneficial as reading and listening to seemingly random pieces of information? It’s because I was doing the thinking myself. I was doing the connecting myself. As Charlotte Mason says, people are capable of making pretty profound connections if they are just given a wide feast of ideas to read, listen to, and disgest. One of the many benefits of reading is the ability to make connections and think deeply about what we read.

Reading vs. Surfing

To get some of the benefits of reading, you need to do a specific kind of reading. I recently finished a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr. It was written in 2009 and described the changes that the author already was beginning to see at that time in the way that our brains worked. He particularly focuses on the ways that our tools change the way that we think. He uses the example of a clock, invented by monks to keep strict time at a monastery. With the invention of the clock, the world ended up eventually being changed. We can feel how time controls us when we go through Daylight Savings Time. Our bodies expect one thing, and we yearn for more light at the end of the day. But, the clock is a harsh master and refuses to change its ticking.

The internet is similarly changing us now. In ancient times, we were a primarily oral culture. Stories were passed down through generations to keep alive wisdom and culture. With the invention of writing, much of that wisdom was preserved. It wasn’t until the invention of the codex and book that a primarily scribal culture was born. So, whereas oral culture used stories, epithets, and repetitive recursive speech to keep information in mind, scribal cultures could write down increasingly complex ideas. Effectively, they were able to get their thoughts down on the page and then think about their thoughts leading to increasingly complex thought patterns. Information exploded with the advent of the printing press which led to the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and our modern-day society.

One interesting observation in the book is that the very nature of independent reading, which came about centuries after the first codex was created in 60 A.D., created a private conversation between the reader and the author. The author could say potentially controversial ideas, and the reader would have to wrestle with how they thought about those ideas. All of this was done in the privacy of their own minds, and then, after the fact, could be discussed in front of everyone else. This opened the door for the highly independent culture that we have today as well as much of the political thought that we have. The mental wrestling with ideas that we saw at the height of the technology of the book produced the philosophy behind the 99 Thesis, the Declaration of Independence, and Shakespeare.

With the Radio, TV, and ultimately the internet, we are moving ever more closely backward in time to the oratory culture of the past. As people choose to not read, they are choosing to go online more and more. Jen Twenge’s book iGen describes how the only thing that is really different between Gen Xers, Millenials, and iGen is that iGen is spending much more time online on social media and playing video games than previous generations did as teens (those generations are probably online a whole lot more now too). As we do this, we are getting away from a scribal culture and moving towards that oratory culture. Why? Because the internet is a particularly social space. We think more shallowly – especially with the arrival of AI – and most of us process information in groups through social media posts and comments. We are making meaning and understanding our world through online conversations. That deep thinking between just a reader and author – as well as the practice of deep conversations (see Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle) – is becoming scarce.

Some people state that we are actually reading more than ever before because of the print nature of much of the web. However, Carr states that most people only spend 10 seconds or less on a webpage. Most blog posts – including the transcript for this podcast – are roughly 1,500-3,000 words. You can’t read that in 10 seconds! We are skimming online and not reading closely. It is a very different type of experience than reading a print book. To get the benefits of reading we are talking about here, you really need to read a print book alone to think deeply about it.

The Rise of Sports and the Demise of Reading

Interestingly, there is a disparity between boys and girls when it comes to reading statistics, with girls tending to read more than boys throughout their lifetime. The book, The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Treallease, talks about this. His hypothesis for this reason actually points to sports. Before the rise of televised sports, fathers were seen reading the afternoon newspaper, working around the house, and maybe even reading aloud from a favorite novel or the Bible at night. Around the 60’s and 70’s that changed, particularly with the rise of Sunday and Monday Night Football. As TV brought sports into the household, men began to watch sports more and more. And of course, their sons did as well. The test scores of boys have since been steadily falling.

An LA times article writes, “Many boys end up in children’s remedial reading classes not because they have “learning disabilities, but father disabilities,” Trelease said. Their fathers, he said, teach them that “the really important things in life are the things we throw and catch . . . you do not see me (the average father) get excited about ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ ” the E. B. White classic.”

It’s really a question of what we are prioritizing. Are we prioritizing the act of learning and growing? Or the act of consuming and being entertained?

When we choose to prioritize sports and entertainment, we are losing out on the benefits of reading.

The Benefits of Reading

There are so many benefits of reading. Here are just a few.

The very nature of our faith is based on the word being living and active. Through the Bible, we see the life-changing power of deep conversations that happen between an author and a reader. We recognize as well that there is something very different about your understanding of a text when you can take the time to read and digest it alone away from the noise and pressure of social life as compared to making meaning through a class or sermon where someone is reading that text to you. Part of the proliferation of the Bible, and as a result the Christian faith, was that the technology of the codex was just coming into being. Curiously, the rise of secular, almost pagan, ideology coincides with the demise of the book.

We are a people of the book, and so we need to recognize and affirm the power that reading can have over our lives. Our daily quiet time with God and the practice of reading the Bible regularly individually should be an utmost priority in our lives.

But more than that, why should we read other books?

I’ve heard several people say that they recognize that the Bible is important. But, that it really is the only book that is worth reading.

Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 says, “The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” So yes, there is some truth to the fact that reading too much and idolizing the pursuit of knowledge can lead to worthless living. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Solomon ended up living the life that he did. He was given wisdom by God (just like we are given wisdom in the Bible), but he didn’t trust the wisdom that he was given. So he spent his life trying to pursue true wisdom. The great irony was that he already had it – the sum of the matter was to ‘fear God and keep his commandments.’

So does this mean that we shouldn’t pursue reading?

I don’t believe that. I think that knowledge can be an idol, yes. But, I also believe that knowledge is something that we have been given. As long as we keep it in its rightful place, just like we’ve been talking about with several of our other habits, reading, and the knowledge that we learn, can be a life-giving pursuit that helps us to glorify God. We can reap the benefits of reading as we use it as a tool.

Most of the ideas and concepts I talk about in my podcast are not my own. They come out of me entering into the great conversation by having a vibrant reading life. Then, I can use what I’ve learned to make connections, teach others, and have a more purposeful, intentional, and beautiful life. Reading truly makes me a better person. I can attest to the many benefits of reading.

Entering into the Great Conversation: The Benefits of Reading and How it Changes You

Now this last point seems a little contradictory to what I spoke about concerning the Shallows. One of the benefits of reading is that it helps us to think more deeply. Another of the benefits of reading is the ability that we have to enter into the Great Conversation. When we read, we are entering into a conversation – The Great Conversation. In today’s modern individualistic society, we often view people from the past as out of touch (even if ‘the past’ only means one or two generations ago). We think that because of new technology and cultural norms, people from the past could never understand us. Reading novels and stories of people who lived long ago shows us that is simply not true. People are people – whether they lived in 1500 B.C., 0 A.D., or 2023 A.D. Yes, our perception of the world has changed with technology and other modern conveniences, but our hearts and tendencies are very similar.

So, when you read a book, regardless of when it was written, you are not only entering into a conversation with the author. You are entering into the conversation of all books with all authors. So, think of it like a river or a stream. The great conversation is the river of all the books and thoughts and ideas. When an author writes something, they are choosing to add to that great river. The thoughts and ideas are all engaging with others – they don’t exist by themselves.

One of the best ways to become an expert in a field is to get a book on a topic and then get all the books that book mentions. You can keep going through the process until you have gotten a good handle on the information out there concerning what you are interested in. I actually did this when I first started studying habits for a class at my church. I read the book Habits of the Household. The author of that book referenced several others and I read those. Soon, I had read almost 30 books concerning all of the topics I’ve talked about on this podcast and some that I haven’t gotten to yet.

When you recognize that books are a conversation between the author, you, and the wider thought about that topic, then you will start to read differently mostly because you will desire to engage in those ideas. Have you ever listened to a sermon or a podcast and wanted to talk back to the speaker and explain why maybe they were totally wrong (or right) about an idea? What you’ve done is taken their ideas, thought about them, and internalized some of them, and then you’ve entered into the conversation. You want to explain your position.

That is the process of being changed by reading:

You take in ideas.
You engage with them and make a narrative of them, connecting them with other ideas.
Then, you establish your stance about them. You sift through what was wrong or right in those ideas and justify your position.

This is the point of the reading that we do. We clarify our thoughts and ideas and who we are as people by entering into the Great Conversation. But this necessitates that we read widely and well. To enter into the conversation means that we need to understand what those authors read in the past and generally that will send us down a rabbit trail of reading more and more broadly until we have traced the thread back to the Greeks, to Fairy Tales, and to the great myths of the past.

We don’t believe everything – or even most – of what we read, but we learn discernment through the engagement with deep and complex ideas. We are strengthened, sharpened, by what we read. And then we in turn, if educated well, can also enter into that conversation.

Next Week: Practical Tips to Start Your Reading Habit

So, in sum, reading is a habit that you should have. There are so many benefits of reading. And, the type of reading I am talking about is to get away for a few minutes by yourself and engage in a text that challenges you and helps you to grow and learn new things. This type of reading – not reading through comments on an Instagram post or scanning a news article – is what will help you to think more deeply about yourself and the world.

Today, we’ve focused mainly on the birdseye view of the current state of reading and why reading is important. We talked about the many benefits of reading. Next week, we are going to get super practical with some suggestions for how to cultivate a reading habit in your life now.

If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review wherever you are listening to this podcast. This helps others find the show and I would be so grateful for your support! You can find me on Facebook and Instagram where you can reach out and let me know what you think! I’d love for you to join in the conversation. See you back here next week for the next episode.

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