Reading for betterment
Beyond pleasure: how reading can make us better people
A few weeks ago I wrote about why ‘reading for pleasure’ may not be an approrpiate or meaningful curricular aim.
In this post I’m going to explore an alternative vision on what else reading might be for.
Reading books, at least for me, has never been only about pleasure. The notion that we should aim to make children read for pleasure feels a bit like a con trick: if we can only convince young people that reading books is great fun they’ll ditch their phones about pick up a novel.
Obviously, I have no objection to children - or anyone else - getting joy from reading. Some of the most intensely pleasurable moments I’ve experienced have come from being immersed in a book. What troubles me is the thinness of our ambition when pleasure is all we aim for. Doing anything purely for enjoyment - hedonism - is a pretty low bar. Pleasure is easy to chase and quick to fade. It usually requires little commitment and less effort. If enjoyment is our only criterion, the safest option will always be the shallowest one.
If we want students to find reading pleasurable, the least effective route is to chase pleasure directly. The danger of setting enjoyment as the primary goal is that it encourages us to lower expectations. We smooth away difficulty, thin out content and mistake ease for success. But pleasures that endure tend to be those that are earned.
If we want students to find reading pleasurable, the least effective route is to chase pleasure directly. A more reliable approach to making something more pleasurable is to get better at it. Competence changes the texture of experience. What begins as effort becomes fluency. What once felt taxing starts to feel absorbing. This is as true of reading as it is of running, playing an instrument or learning a language. Struggle crowds out pleasure. Mastery makes it possible.
This is why appeals to enjoyment as a starting point so often misfire. Enjoyment is rarely the cause of sustained engagement but it may be the consequence. We come to enjoy what we can do well, and we do well at what we put effort into practising.
So, asking how to get children to read for pleasure is the wrong question. If anyone ever discovers how to make people enjoy doing things they would rather avoid, they will make a fortune. But, maybe more importantly, they will have misunderstood what reading can be do. Reading has never mattered because it is easy or immediately gratifying (although, of course, it can be) it matters because it changes what we notice, what we think about and how we understand ourselves and others.
Can reading make us better people?
If better means kinder, wiser, more morally dependable, then reading offers no guarantees. History is full of intelligent, articulate, well read people who have done appalling things. Books do not confer virtue through some form of moral osmosis. No novel, however profound, inoculates us against selfishness or cruelty. Anyone hoping for moral improvement as a predictable outcome of reading is destined for disappointment.
But if better means enlarged, then the case is stronger. I’ve written before about ‘serious reading’ and the effects it can have on our intellectual growth:
Serious reading demands sustained attention. It asks us to inhabit perspectives not our own. It confronts us with motives, conflicts and consequences that resist neat resolution. And, in doing so, it works against the grain of a culture that increasingly prizes immediacy, certainty and instant affirmation.
This is why I find the way we often talk about reading in education so anaemic. The dominant view of reading is entirely instrumental: reading is valued because it raises scores, improves outcomes, widens opportunity. All of this may be true, but it leaves reading itself hollowed out by ignoring what is read in favour of the act of reading itself. The verb is prioritised over the noun. If all we value are the benefits, content becomes interchangeable. A paragraph lifted from its context and pasted into a worksheet will do. Students may learn how to analyse language, but they are unlikely to learn why anyone would choose to spend hours alone with a book.
The idea that serious reading is itself a culturally beneficial activity cuts against this logic. We have grown comfortable defending literacy as a useful skill while shying away from the claim that some books are worth reading because they enlarge and improve us. The humanist defence of reading feels unfashionable in an age obsessed with impact, evidence and utility. Yet without it we are left with a diminished account of why reading matters at all.
Debates about reading so often talk past each other. We argue fiercely about how children should be taught to read, but are too often vague about what they should read once they can. Perhaps the deeper problem is not that reading seems hard when there are so many easier options available so much that it hasn’t been given a clear purpose. As extracts replace book and comprehension tasks replace meaningful experiences, literature becomes a chore to be ticked off rather than offering an enriched interior life.
There is an irony that while reading itself is culturally recent, stories are not. Humans are narrative beings. We made (and continue to make) sense of the world through story long before we learn to decode print. When we are immersed in stories that feel like they matter, language has the power to transport us to an infinity of different minds, times and places.
How reading literature can make us better
Literature affects the mind through a set of interlocking psychological functions which enhance our capacity to think and feel. In this view, literature is a cultural technology for training cognitive capacities and making us better versions of ourselves. The list that follows is inspired by (although not copied from) the ideas of Angus Fletcher in his marvellous book, Wonderworks and includes dozens of suggestions for reading particular works of literature designed to make us better.
Perspective building
Perspective building is perhaps the most quietly transformative work literature can do on the mind. It is not about teaching empathy in the sentimental sense, nor about urging readers to approve of characters’ choices but training our capacity to see, simultaneously, how different versions of the world can be sincerely inhabited.
Middlemarch is the classic case because it is so patient and so unsparing. Eliot refuses to grant any single consciousness moral priority. Dorothea’s idealism is genuine and admirable, yet also naïve. Casaubon’s pedantry is constricting, yet rooted in fear and disappointment rather than malice. Lydgate’s self belief is energising and ruinous at the same time. The reader is not invited to choose sides but to understand how each life makes sense from within. Over time, the mind becomes accustomed to complexity without resolution. Judgement is slowed, not suspended, but deepened.
A similar training takes place in Mrs Dalloway, though by very different means. Woolf’s shifting interior monologue carries the reader effortlessly from Clarissa’s composed social surface to Septimus’s disintegrating inner world. Neither perspective cancels the other. Clarissa’s poise is not exposed as shallow, nor is Septimus reduced to a case study. Instead, the novel insists that these radically different experiences coexist within the same moment in time. The reader learns to move between sanity and breakdown, privilege and exclusion, without collapsing one into the other.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart extends this work into the political and historical realm by refusing the comfort of a single moral lens. Okonkwo’s values are coherent within his cultural world, even when they are brutal. Colonial intervention is shown as both disruptive and, at times, administratively rational. Rather than resolving these tensions, the novel leaves the reader with incompatible truths held in balance. Easy condemnation and easy justification are both made impossible.
In each of these cases, literature trains the mind to resist the craving for a single, authoritative account. Readers practise holding more than one truth at once, not as an abstract exercise, but as a lived mental experience sustained over hundreds of pages. This is a demanding form of thinking. It requires patience, humility and a willingness to remain uncertain longer than feels comfortable.
Thiscapacity is increasingly rare. Much contemporary discourse rewards speed, certainty and alignment. Literature of this kind does the opposite. It slows judgement, thickens interpretation and reminds us that human situations are rarely reducible to slogans or sides. Perspective building, in this sense, is not about becoming nicer. It is about becoming harder to deceive, including by one’s own preferences.
Tolerance of uncertainty
