Reading in Community: Does it Matter?

When I pulled into my driveway the weather app on my phone, still set to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, showed a balmy 79°.  As I opened the car door, a wall of 99° moist air engulfed me. My week of idyllic reading community had officially ended. I had driven home from the Close Reads retreat through rural Georgia in silence, contemplating the week. What made it so good? There was the obvious: we were gathered at a mountain resort for a week of good wine and food and thoughtful discussions about the beloved Pride and Prejudice. But it was much more than that, a little taste of heaven, a week of knowing and being known. Why?

Reading together is about much more than an interest in the same books. Ultimately, reading in community happens when you are facing the same direction, asking the same questions. This is essentially how C. S. Lewis describes friendship in The Four Loves:

It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? Means Do you see the same truth? Or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’ The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.[1]

Reading well is, in the end, about loving well and that’s rather hard to do alone. Reading the great books from the Western canon tunes our hearts to love good writing. But it’s more than that – it tunes your moral imagination to see others. In The Power and the Glory, the whisky priest observes that hatred is a failure of imagination. While I think there is a bit more to hatred than that, those words have never left me. There are wrongs that I have forgiven because my moral imagination has been tuned through literature, times that I could imagine what it might be like from another person’s perspective. There are also times (perhaps more frequently) that I have hated because I would not imagine, instead thinking, “Well, I would never…”

When you are reading together, your moral imagination is no longer limited to the metaphors drawn from the images in your own memory; the experience is multiplied. Each has her own unique set of images from experiences, her own metaphors to share. In conversation these metaphors are joined together and we find a new way to see. This is not to say that everyone brings metaphors that are equally valid or true. At times, there are multiple interpretations that can be supported by the text or ways in which understanding can be nuanced. On the other hand, some interpretations are just wrong whether due to lack of skill, inexperience as a reader, or simply our own blind spots and biases. In these instances, reading in community opens us up to correction that we never would have found alone.

I first read Pride and Prejudice as a teenager and the story has worn a deep groove in my imagination. I was surprised to find how many different viewpoints there were of the characters whom I thought I knew so well. Take Mr. Bennet, for example. Though funny, he is passive and snide, two particularly undesirable characteristics in a husband and a father. At the retreat, I heard a new perspective: maybe Mr. Bennet is at a complete loss as to how to father and is doing his best. This perspective from a caring father gave me a new possible way to read Mr. Bennet. Though I ultimately don’t read Mr. Bennet that sympathetically, my perspective was refined as I realized that he is guilty not of things done, but of things left undone. The week was full of such examples – new ways of seeing, broadening my imagination from the experiences of others and, most importantly, agreeing on which questions were worth asking.

Most cannot go to the Close Reads retreat. And even those who can are left wondering what to do with the other 359 days in the year. The answer is closer than you think. My most precious reading community is the one that my husband and I have built together within our own four walls. A literary culture is inherent to the fabric of our home. The images and language from the stories have become a shared way of understanding and navigating the life that we have been given. Inculcating a love for great literature in our children has been pretty straightforward: we only read them good books and do so with contagious delight.

Last fall, during our family vacation to the North Carolina mountains, my twelve-year-old son planned to re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and asked me to read along beside him. We had “reading parties” in the evenings, wrapped in blankets reading Tolkien. A fast reader, I foolishly challenged him to a reading race, and he was well through The Two Towers before I had finished The Fellowship of the Ring. On hikes he proudly explained the legendarium to me. One evening, we lingered around the table. Though the steak was gone and the sun was set a little wine remained. I struck up a conversation about Galadriel’s mirror. What exactly was happening? If the visions they saw were not prophecies, then what were they? Was she tempting them? I don’t remember much of what was said; as much as anything I wanted to start a lively discussion. The evening faded but my joy remained, joy in having a middle school son who wants to talk about books with mom, even if only books by Tolkien. By God’s grace we are building the reading community in our home that I had longed for one page at a time.

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 65-66.