Do "Books Make You a Boring Person?"

In My Humble Opinion
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I feel so busted.

I’m a lifelong, avid, addicted, at-least-five-books-going-at-a-time reader. I don’t remember learning to read. Being “a reader” has always been a huge piece of my identity.

I always got so much respect from teachers and other adults and even a sort of grudging, I-hate-you admiration from my peers for all that reading. I felt like I had a deep dark secret…I wasn’t improving myself, I was just having fun. I was reading for escape, entertainment and fantasy.

Do books make you boring? Well being self-righteous about anything certainly makes you boring. Being a bookworm probably makes you boring to people with other interests.

I certainly don’t look down on people who “don’t read” although I think I did as a teenager. It was only reading this thread that I realized I’m married to someone who “doesn’t read”. I think my husband was a big reader as a kid and he certainly has the language skills of your average avid reader, but he just developed other interestas as he grew older, more attracting ways to spend ever diminishing free time. He’s still an interesting, stimulating person to be with (to me at least!)

I guess I take the author’s point that reading shouldn’t get the sort of automatic respect it seems to (although for kids it still should, for the school-smarts benefits it confers). I would hope that all people would have respect for differing interests and passions and no one would ever seek to look down on another for having different gifts, talents and passions.

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Well, actually, people should read throughout their lives, to continue to benefit from the “smarts” that reading bestows upon them. The brain gets rusty after a while—apt to forget words not used often, apt to forget proper grammar, etc. Reading is like a jump start. Keeps the juices flowing.

I have a great respect for people with differing interests and passions. In fact, if I had to choose between a dusty, dry bookworm who read all the “right” books but felt little passion, and the person who rarely read but was full of energy and passion for all their interests and talents, I’d rather spend time with the non-reader who was energetic.

However, it’s hard to fathom that someone who is so passionate about something would not read about it. And most pastimes, passions and talents have accompanying books that most afficionados will want to possess and read.

My mom is a crackpot (I say that with love) and she’s quite “into” alternative medicine, crackpot theories about health, and so forth. (So am I to some extent, but no one beats her in crackpotedness.) Anyway, she’s got TONS of books. Because that’s where all the information about the new crackpot theories come from—books.

My dad was passionate about England (our family “roots”), trains and streetcars, photography, geology, biology, and Classical music. So he had books. Walls of them.

I’m passionate about art, digital art, pottery, National Parks and scenery, and currently I’m fervently learning a new language. So I’ve got my own wall of books on these subjects.

And so forth and so on.

A while ago I was with my mom as she was filling out some questionaire that she got, and she was supposed to fill in the blanks for all her pastimes and interests. She was checking off her interests, and when she came to reading, she said, “We aren’t really readers, are we?” I looked at her as if she had grown an extra set of arms and waved impatiently all around her. Books. Freakin’ books, everywhere. My dad’s books, her books. Books books books books! Some books aren’t always the kind that you sit down and read from front to back, like a novel, but you open them, you read them, and you absorb the good stuff in them. That still counts as reading.

I know that there are people who are passionate about, say, music, or art, or film, instead of reading, but it’s really hard to imagine that someone who is so passionate about such a thing would not have books about the subject. I mean, there are so many great books about art, complete with analysis and color plates—how could an art lover not want to have such a book? Same goes for music or film. So many books full of wonderful stuff, covering these topics. So for someone to not ever have any books—if they are truly passionate about these kinds of things—well, it’s possible, and it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with them, but it seems to me like it would be very unusual.