What is so special about reading? A book, according to a dictionary, is just “a set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers”. A sequence of chapters, themselves a sequence of paragraphs, themselves a sequence of sentences, themselves a sequence of words, all this formed by 30 or so letters (at least in the case of most European alphabets). So how come books have become the leading ‘depository’ of human knowledge?

However, what we understand by books only appeared with the onset of industrialised modernity. In the 15th century, Gutenberg produced the first “modern bestseller” in ‘paperback’ – the Bible, but truly massive scale (although incomparable to the 200 000 books per year published in Europe – roughly a book every 2.5 minutes) was attained only with the invention of a steam-powered printing press. Thus, during the preceding centuries, books have been full of insights, but they remained particular physical objects – to own a couple of books was thus a sign of elitism, of status, the wisdom of which was available only to a select few. A useful parallel can be drawn here with visual arts – paintings all too often used to be more physical expressions of status and wealth first and foremost, and only then works of art (mainly reduced conceptually to aesthetics). However the age of mechanical reproduction initiated by the Industrial Revolution posed a serious question about the uniqueness of each painting or sculpture (see John Berger – Ways of Seeing), but this problem was not present to the books. Books, as the dictionary definition suggests, are composed of words – and words are not unique in themselves, nor are they by themselves a work of art (with the notable exception of calligraphy). Therefore, the ‘modernization’ of books easily shifted the emphasis from their uniqueness in terms of quantity to the uniqueness of books in terms of quality, or content. Two caveats are in order here. First, a book remains a physical object, even if of less exclusive quality, and therefore an object for acquisition in itself – even the act of buying James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for example brings purely consumerist satisfaction (and again denotes status – if you are buying “Ulysses” you are effectively declaring yourself as part of an elite with enough time and intellectual energy to spare in order to probe ‘deep’ questions, with enough leisure time, education, and resources – it is not a particularly cheap book – to spare). The effect of these market relations is twofold (and easily observed in other capitalist phenomena) – on the one hand, publishers and editors perform the role of ‘filters’ and may refuse to publish, that is, to bring into existence a book based on a manuscript – in which case the manuscript remains only a private achievement for the author and not a work, which speaks to an audience; on the other hand, market mechanisms naturally stimulate the production of purely entertainment literature, which consequently floods the market and leaves no choice to the reader/consumer but to look for guidance from professionals, be it literary critics or booksellers. The second caveat is that ancient books, or books from different cultures, whose words are mechanically reproduced today, require extra attention from the reader. Often, they might well have some timeless lesson to offer – but in order to ‘uncover’ this lesson, the reader needs extensive background knowledge. For example, it is particularly easy to read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” today as a cynic, unethical, and perhaps ironically outdated piece of writing belonging to ‘another time’. If the reader, however, is willing to reread the work, engage with it, and make an effort to understand (for complete knowledge is of course impossible) the epoch and the culture, which gave birth to the work, they may well find some ‘lessons’. In short, therefore, the books remains a modern physical commodity.

Despite these physical properties, which form the ‘spine’ of the book, most people would say it is the words which really count. What I am interested here is not so much what makes a great book great (people who know may have heard me declare that great books are almost always short, but I do recognise that length is hardly a proper way to judge a book), but rather what is the alchemy ‘reading’. Here, again, we need to first recognize the physical properties of reading. The act of reading requires two (and as I refer to private reading, no more than two) ‘participants’ – a book and a person. The act itself is a complex cognitive process, which involves overwhelmingly the eye, but also marginally touch and maybe smell. What is particularly fascinating about the process is how the Cartesian subject (the “I” of the reader) is essentially assuming the role of a receptor (although any serious reader should also ‘engage’ with what he or she is reading, but this is a post-factum process where the mind processes the ideas received by the book). Thus, essentially every time the “I” picks a book it recognizes the limited nature of its knowledge about the world and is therefore ready to learn more.

The alchemy of the process of reading is rooted in the process of decoding and ‘reconstructing’ the ‘message’ of the book. Essentially, it can be conceptualized by a two stage process, involving in both cases the brain. In the first part, through the medium of the eyes, we ‘decode’ the meaning of a particular sequence of symbols – a word or a sentence. Here it is important to remember one of Magritte’s most famous paintings:

Indeed, the painting is not a pipe, just as the word “chair” is not a chair, but the concept of chair. Some words can only exist as concepts, such as abstract nouns (love, confidence) or adjectives (beautiful, serious) (the universal recognition of such qualities is perhaps a good basis for the construction of a basic common humanity). This, of course, brings us to Saussure in particular, as well as Derrida and Barthes, and the question of the signifier and the signified. Words in a text are, in essence, signifiers – they only physically exist as dots of ink, but they conjure concepts in our minds. This is indeed the second stage of the process – the conjuring of the signified from our brain. Arguably, this is an even more complex cognitive process, where people dip into their knowledge structures, regardless of how we describe them as schemas, operational codes, etc. What books and reading does, then, is to add to our empirical knowledge or to prompt us to look upon our existing information in a new light. Thus, the decoding of the signifier on the page and the reconstruction of the signified in the mind, based on previous knowledge, is the ‘alchemy’, which forms the basis of reading.

Finally, this whole process requires enormous concentration and, depending on the book (and consequently the challenges it poses to our preexisting knowledge), varying degrees of intellectual energy and involvement. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that in the ever-faster moving postmodern world, with its ‘pointillist time’ to quote Zygmunt Bauman, with its entertainment simulacra culture (to borrow from Baudrillard), reading is mostly a neglected activity. In a world, where the biggest resource is time (“Time is money”), a book is a significant ‘investment’ with uncertain result, even if we assume that we have the intellectual interest and purchasing power to afford books. The ‘best’ books are those, who question and unsettle in order to help you see the world in a different way, and therefore cannot be ‘bestsellers’ in the entertainment-oriented market culture, much like the artistic and challenging films cannot equal the ‘box office successes’ of Hollywood movies.

A book is also a journey – it takes you from the first to the last page, whatever its narrative structure or plot, and just like with journeys, it is not the destination which is important, but the process. Thus, the pages of a book represent a promise – a promise to organise the world and to help you understand your place in it. In that sense, books give wings.

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