A week or so ago at a breakfast of writers, I found myself saying something that, on the face of it, sounded fairly harsh: “I never read a book suggested to me.” A startled (and maybe hurt) look from one my tablemates: “Really?” And I had to say: “Yes.” Now, setting aside the fact that “never” is probably too strong a word, we could go into this and such other personal oddities as, for instance, never quite finding time to open up any of the library books I’ve checked out before they are due or barely touching a book lent to me by another or, egad, the fine footwork involved in denying someone’s request for one of the books in my library. It’s not snobbery, I don’t think, so much as feeling that one’s reading life is a river and one is piloting a boat on it and night is falling and there’s a suspicious pool round your feet and one ought not make any unscheduled stops or take on extraneous ballast. Or something equally visual.

So it was a treat to catch this bit from Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms that pretty well sums up how I feel about the possession of books. I’ll let him have the last word.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So . . . a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

It may seem obvious, but isn’t the eloquence of human thought a product not of conversation, but of the printed word? In discussing literacy, I suppose I simply want to acknowledge that a mind will be able to express itself in subtlety only if its owner learns subtlety of expression, and that quality can most effectively be learned by reading it on the page.

It’s that old thing: I write to know what I think (who’s responsible for that nugget?). Reading is how we learn to express the depth and shading and nuance of sophisticated thought. Nearing the end of his life and looking over his work, John Cheever said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.”

You can live and die in that statement, and I’m sure a part of each writer does. But the subtleties we have to employ in managing our cities, our country, and the relationships of global cultures, as well our families and ourselves, are nurtured by just such a thing: a page of good prose. Or a poem. Or a novel. Or a biography, history, essay, or letter. Considered words, written in reflection and read in meditation. The fineness of the written word — and, surely, it’s not all fine, but the reader’s discernment is part of the process of developing eloquent thought — contributes to the refinement of its reader’s thinking mind.

The reflected thought, contemplated, absorbed.

That’s all.