BY BORDI JAEN
AS STATED in my previous article, I don’t think I need to expound any further the merits of reading. You’ve probably heard all the reasons for doing so. From being entertaining, to increasing cognitive thinking, and so on. The inculcation is clear: Reading is beneficial!
However, might I then expound on the benefits of a variety of reading?
There is a variety of books as wide as there is a variety of cuisines in the world. There are novels, self-help, poetry, biographies, short stories, commentaries, and many more kinds. The reader, to be truly well-read, must embark upon a journey with numerous destinations to harvest the benefits of reading. It is this multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to reading that squeezes out the maximum effectivity of learning from the activity.
There is importance in reading great works of fiction as there is in reading great works of history. There is as much importance in the reading Plutarch and Aristotle as there is importance in the reading of Homer and Ovid.
The baker needs math to calculate portions. The corporate executive needs the soft skills of public speaking to properly present company figures. The writer himself needs a good understanding of what he writes about least his writing comes to naught.
There’s a reason why we learn as much as we can about everything in high school, despite us never truly using all that knowledge. In an increasingly competitive world where education is all the more necessary to not only advance but to even begin the salary grade, it pays to have a well-rounded self-education obtained through reading a variety of books.
Not everyone loves to read lugubrious, fact-condensed texts that non-fiction books mostly are. The encounter of reading for most people is reading entertaining books mostly in the form of the novel or the story. Not wanting to be beaten by non-fiction, this type of book is as vast as the seven seas in its complexity and vastness of catalogue. They vary in their style, diction, forms, and terms. Their very essence is never the same in every culture and nation. The words of each culture pang uniquely.
I am especially an advocate of reading novels of as many cultures and nations as possible. Fortunately, in an increasingly globalized world, this is easier to do than in the past. Every country has their Rizal, Lopez Jaena and Quijano de Manila. The wealth of the world’s cumulative experiences is too vast for one entity to own. Each writer is like a weaver spinning silks of their country’s beauty, hardships, and other characteristics intricately interwoven with their own personal magical qualities than not only define the author but the nation and its people.
I admit, my partial motivation for not only aiming myself but encouraging others to read the great books of other countries is that great Stoic concept of cosmopolitanism where in truth, we all belong in a singular world, in a singular community. We are all human. What better and more convenient way is there to understand our other fellow brothers and sisters of mankind than in the reading of their literature?
Examples of foreign classics that have captivated my imagination are Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and of course, shall I ever fail to mention Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov? The funny thing about reading these classic novels of foreign origin is that they are both unique and universal. Unique in that we may never understand, nay feel, their culture’s niches and nooks as their countrymen do (let them keep their Je ne sais quoi, I do not expect a foreigner to feel Noli Me Tangere as we do) but universal in the sense that we feel as they do, as we are. We cry and weep for their hardships. We are euphoric over their victories of successes. We feel these things for their adventures, toils, and passing are of a similar nature to what we’ve struggled, do struggle or will come to struggle. Yet, we also awe and have our sense of curiosity satisfied over the things which are only truly relatable to one who has lived or lives in the author’s environs. A personal example of this being the rather short African classic novel The Beggars’ Strike where apparently, in the cultural setting of it, the act of giving alms is especially important and pious for people, hence beggars have a special role in the city where the setting of the story is.
To curious people, the story involves a government official trying to get rid of the beggars but finding that doing so has caused panic in the city and even personal ill-luck because of the piety that giving alms brings to the giver. Perhaps I could never truly feel it for our own culture does not place the act of almsgiving to that degree.
In the last article, I have mentioned the merits of reading slowly and rereading. In this article, I have discussed the merits of casting the nets far and wide. Although we may never be able to read every book that was ever printed in existence, we may yet still be able to read a few of the best books from the four corners of the world.
Dear reader, I hope I have inspired thee to some degree of being a fisherman that goes yonder to many places by their sea of pages, carried by thine eyes into a unique realm of imagining blotted ink spots.
What book will you be picking up next?/PN
