I'm Glad I Developed The Habit Of Reading

Misinformation Campaigns And The Search For Answers

The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, my current read

Hello!!!

This is Joyie and welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet where I talk all things books!

Have you been reading anything this week?

After finishing Anna Karenina, I feel like I’m done for the year. I’m still trying to finish my annual re-read of Wuthering Heights, but apart from that, I plan to sit back and relax and read a few non-fictions. Although I’ll admit, I find reading non-fiction significantly harder than reading fiction. But at this point, I’m driven by a sense of fear and desperation. And this also is in a way the reason I feel I’m lucky that I developed the habit of reading. 

I mentioned in a previous letter that I don’t read because of some intellectually-driven motivation. Reading, first and foremost, was my coping mechanism. Until my early twenties, I read because I liked stories. I didn’t stop to peel the layers of those stories and see beneath. But still, reading is like life, whether you’re actively looking for lessons to learn or not, it will teach you. And so it did. 

We humans live in bubbles. We’re born into bubbles and these bubbles keep us confined, keep us blind to whatever goes on outside. It’s not easy breaking out of those bubbles, primarily because we often don’t even know the bubble exists. For me, reading told me about the bubble and about the world beyond. I grew up in a time before the internet took over, and information wasn’t available on the large scale it is today. So it was thanks to books that I sought to break out of my bubble and see beyond.

But instead of making me feel better, it made me skeptical. Now I know bubbles exist, and to quote Haruki Murakami:

Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

So, now I’m always trying to look further and it never ends. The more I read, the more I find out how much there still remains to be read. I read something, and realise I should read another piece to understand this one better. And I go read that, and realise there’s something else I should read to understand that piece better. It’s a never ending quest. It’s frustrating, I thought learning will make me feel more sure, but it has only made me more and more unsure. But I’ll never complain about that.

In our world, information has always been used as a tool to control people. So many people are ready to try and convince us that they have all the right answers and so, we should just listen to them and do their bidding. Living in a world like that, being skeptical, and always doing your own research is one of the most important habits one needs to develop. Not because it’ll give us our final answers, but in that process of searching, we’ll end up learning a lot, and that will save us from falling victim to false information.

That’s why right now I’m feeling like I need to read these non-fiction books, to learn, not to have answers, but just to have context.

What about you? Why do you think reading is important? I'd love to hear about it!!!

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That’s it for today, I'll be back in your inbox next week.

Until then,

Joyie 🌻