The power of old books

What I’m about to recommend won’t just help bored A+ students; it can help anyone.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

My daughter is bored. All A’s. Sinking into oblivion. What’s something that can supplement her learning and help?

Usually, when a parent says, “My child is bored,” it’s a nonsensical excuse for why the child is failing. But when the parent of an A+ student says it, I’m apt to believe it, especially knowing what I know about the systematic watering-down of curricula. It definitely warrants parental measures. What I’m about to recommend, however, won’t just help bored A+ students; it can help anyone.

Read old books.

“Old” doesn’t necessarily mean hundreds of years. It just means books that have had time to distinguish themselves as something more than time-tethered ephemera. Yes, Jane Eyre would qualify, but so would Harry Potter.

Reading old books also doesn’t mean doing it exclusively. C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) recommended reading an old book for every one or two new ones. He wrote, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

The intellectual jolt those books can bring is anything but boring, especially in the era of social media, where students are besieged by the “outlook” of their “own period.” Hovering around a single juncture on the timeline invites the swirl of contemporary concerns that can imprison youth in a mental sandstorm. By constricting their perspective, it constricts their choices. As writer Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood) said, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis) took things further, writing, “The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely new is the most transitory of all things. It is beautiful today, and tomorrow merely ludicrous.”

Bored students needn’t start with Goethe. I certainly didn’t when I was a bored senior with a free period. With smartphones mercifully years away from existing, I spent most of my time browsing the school library.

I will always remember the chills and thrills hidden within one old book after another. Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie, Ray Bradbury’s S Is for Space, and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle stimulated my imagination in ways new books didn’t. I’ve surrounded myself with old books ever since and have never been bored.

Plenty of distinguished people agree there is power in the young reading old books. One is 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a 2023 essay contest that asked students to address a problem troubling American society. Ruby wrote about teenage depression.

Number one on her list of solutions is to read old books: “Today’s teachers and students talk a lot about ‘relatability;’ they want to see their own lives and experiences reflected in the books they read. I, however, am electrified when a book gives me … words from someone who is not at all like me, from a very different time and place, yet speaks words that feel written just for me. Books that are ‘representative,’ that are more easily ‘absorbed,’ undermine the main reason to read them: to push readers beyond themselves in uncomfortable and productive ways.”

Ruby laments that books are no longer an important part of students’ lives. English classes focus more on information and communication, and when they do emphasize books, they often eschew the classics. The absence of good books, Ruby says, deprives students of companions, counselors, inspiration, and pleasure. “The worst part,” she says, “is that we students are blind to the extent of our loss.”

The loss is growing, making it difficult to even find old books. Portrait of Jennie isn’t available in the average library anymore. (The reasons are a subject for another column.) But if there is a library in your area that keeps books longer than a few years, take your child and let her feast while the feast is available.

Ruby writes of American schools, “The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.” Reading old books can help to reverse this potentially crippling affliction.

Read the original column here.