If you’re a student like me, you probably have a list of awesome novels that you’re planning to dive into — but not until after you’ve finished school. Until recently, I’ve been under the impression that there wasn’t time to read just for fun, since I’m paying a lot of money to read the things on my course syllabi on a certain timeline — novels can wait until future me has fewer papers to write.
University exposes us to innovative ideas, and teaches us to think critically about the world around us. While this is undeniably a good thing, it goes hand-in-hand with a huge amount of assigned readings that invariably take priority over fictional novels that we read just for pleasure.
The problem with this is, for many of us, the years we spend in university coincide with the formative years during which we develop our adult personalities. We build new neural connections as adults as a result of exposure to new experiences, ideas, and information. In a way, our brains are constantly building and rearranging themselves to reflect what’s going on in our environment. This makes it important to consider what kinds of information we are consuming.
Couple this with the fact that it’s impossible to passively consume a novel — we must constantly employ our imagination to fill in the background details that a bound stack of paper covered in inky squiggles does not provide, such as the sound of the main character’s voice, the view out their spaceship window, or the smell of the wooden boards of their pirate ship, saturated with salty sea water. Getting lost in a book is a fun way to bolster your brain’s capacity for creativity.
Reading now, I can almost feel my withered neurons springing back to life.
Watching movies and wasting time on the Internet doesn’t require that we exercise our imaginative powers. This is bad news for students like me, because I’m pretty sure I spend more time on Facebook and Buzzfeed than I do reading novels. I know I’m not the only undergraduate who finds time to watch Game of Thrones every week, but hasn’t finished a book in the last two months.
About a month ago, I was invited to join a bookclub, and almost turned down the offer. “No time,” I thought to myself, no doubt while looking at a cat picture online. Then it hit me: I hadn’t read a page in a novel since the beginning of this semester.
I suddenly thought of past me, who loved reading more than anything, and who would be so disappointed to see her future pitifully devoid of stories and books. I joined the bookclub, and even suggested that we read one of the novels that I had delegated to future me.
Now, I make it a point to spend at least a few minutes a day reading for fun. I’ve already noticed a difference in my mood, and I feel more interested in my coursework. I can almost feel my withered neurons springing back to life, crackling with the energy needed to create the images I see in my mind’s eye when I read.
We are stunting the growth of an important function of our brains when we neglect to read books.
This is why we are responsible for supplementing our academic education with unstructured reading, where all that’s required is an interesting story of which that we can’t wait to read the next page. There is no substitute for reading a book, and we should make it a priority to spend time each day doing so.
