Some people don’t like reading or books because they’re boring, unimportant, and whatever uncultivated excuses one can come up with not to read books. English always gets the short end of stick, written off as a useless or frivolous area of study. But what we book-lovers know is that a text is rich with many uses. It can be used to cultivate analytical or observational skills, for entertainment or persuasion. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of literature as one of its most powerful attributes is the author’s ability to make us feel real emotions.
My inspiration for this article was "The Namesake," by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you haven’t read it, it’s the kind of book that jerks around your emotions and makes you question the feasibility of a happy life. And Jhumpa Lahiri is, to put it mildly, a damn good writer. Not only do I feel privy to the thoughts and emotions of the character, but I also strongly feel like I am a part of each of them (I apologize for the corniness of that phrase). When reading "The Namesake," I became so, so unhappy and sad and depressed that I couldn’t bring myself to read the last few pages. That says a lot since I get unshakably guilty when I don’t finish a book.
Thinking about the story kept me up a lot of the night and I did some reflecting on how involved I feel when reading good books. To be honest, even after reading the Harry Potter books many times, I still experience probably both an unhealthy range and intensity of emotions. Maybe I’m just too emotionally vulnerable and sappy, but when I read a great book, I feel very real emotions even though there’s no real event causing them. When someone in a book dies, it’s almost like a vivid simulation of someone I know quite well dying. I feel real grief, even if for a very brief period of time.
With this topic on my mind, I was reading my social psychology textbook when one of those serendipitous moments happened where the book said what I was thinking: “The more absorbed and ‘transported’ the reader…the more the story affects the reader’s later beliefs.”
Apart from validating my feelings and reassuring me I was merely a victim of social psychology and not insanity, this quote impressed upon me how important books actually are, particularly literature. It has been scientifically proven that merely reading stories can have a strong effect on the reader’s beliefs. In a sense fictitious stories are real, tangibly manipulating our emotions and views in ways that don’t stop working once we finish the book.
