What are books for?

Books have made us readers. They have profoundly transformed our knowledge of the world and have decisively contributed to our social and cultural formation. Two very different scenes, starring children, speak of the close relationship established between readers, books, and life. Written twenty years apart, both present reading as a refuge from the adult world, a shelter where one can build an identity and grow. The first is starred by Matilda, an extraordinary girl who had the misfortune of being born into a mediocre family that belittles her. At three years old, since she cannot find books at home—there is only a cookbook—she escapes every afternoon to the library, where she devours everything she can get her hands on. Her favorite character is Pickwick, by Dickens, because he makes her laugh. The second takes place in a closer space: a coastal town where Anna K. lives, a beautiful girl, the result of an incestuous relationship. One strange day, Anna K. climbs the stairs of the municipal library, terrified, and tries to read to understand everything moving inside her, without order or harmony. Anna K. will not return to the library, but her life, tinged with melodrama, will never be the same. In these two scenes, the protagonists of Matilda, by Roald Dahl, and Anna K., by Martí Rosselló, reveal with great grace the fascination that reading provokes in human beings, a species that, as Irene Vallejo recalls in Manifiesto por la lectura, is so fragile that it needs the word as a lifeline for shipwreck.

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In recent years, several studies have appeared that highlight, once again, the importance of the book in education and culture, as well as its therapeutic and social value. These are works that add nuances and variations to the already classic studies on the history of reading by Alberto Manguel, Gugliemo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Martyn Lyons, which review 6,000 years of written letters in the Western world. In the 21st century, the central theme of reflection has undoubtedly been the emergence of the digital book and the first generative writing platforms. One of the most shared observations concerns the materiality of the medium. For the first time, we have a type of reading, digital, that separates the object from the text: the reader can no longer identify the discourse based on the medium. On the screen, we do not see how the text is arranged; the textual architecture disappears. This implies a different reading practice, hypertextual, more fragmentary and dispersed.

Roger Chartier, in Libro, lectura y cultura escrita. Breve diccionario oral (2021), warns of the risk that digital reading could replace reading from paper books. In his analysis, he tries to understand the logic that governs certain reading gestures and practices, taking into account both their material dimension and the social representations made of them. Chartier makes us see the need, as readers, to pay attention to the form of the book, the page layout, the binding, or the design. He makes us focus on the textual architecture of the book, which implies a certain relationship between the parts that compose it (chapter, paragraph, sentence).

The return to the material dimension of reading can also be related to the need for presence in an increasingly virtual world. Thus, books can be seen as “bodies” through which we relate, think, and interact with the environment. Bodies thanks to which we perform an activity as marginal, or untimely, as reading. In the book Cultura lectora i educació, edited by Jordi Garcia Farrero and Maria Marcos Fernàndez, reading is related to forms of pedagogical resistance. Raúl Navarro, Karine Rivas, and Jordi Gracia emphasize that it should be seen as an antidote to the crisis of narrativity and the homogenization of subjectivity that mainly affects young people. Based on the observations of Lola López Mondéjar (in Sin relato, 2025) and Mark Fisher (in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 2018), they consider reading an untimely practice. It is so because it demands isolation, deceleration, and concentration, characteristics contrary to the logic of late capitalism. For this reason, it can help combat the feeling of “reflective impotence” experienced by many young people, which hinders their formation.

Flexibility in classrooms and teaching methods promotes free and voluntary reading

One of the main effects we experience when reading is disconnection, in a double sense: with respect to oneself and with respect to the world. This effect, which provides well-being, can help us develop empathy. Anthropologist Michèle Petit, in El arte de la lectura en tiempos de crisis, published at the beginning of the financial crisis, recalls critical moments caused by wars or economic problems, in which there was an increase in reading. The various experiences she collects, which take place in different parts of the world, allow her to emphasize the therapeutic values of reading and highlight its anthropological dimension. In difficult times, readers found in reading a space of fictional and symbolic mediation that allowed them to “exist,” to build a place for themselves. More recently, the relationship between reading and health has been the focus of El regal de la lectura, by linguist Sebastià Serrano. It tells a real case that occurred in the 19th century: the protagonist, Claude, recovers from a stroke and regains correct speech articulation thanks to reading, in therapeutic sessions given by a diction specialist working for the Comédie Française.

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Inseparable from the massive literacy process started in the Western world in the 19th century, reading has an evident political dimension. Sociologist Joaquín Rodríguez coined, in 2022, the term lectocracy to refer to the exercise of reading as a critical foundation that allows undermining the most deeply rooted convictions and combating misinformation. This practice moves away from a purely domesticated view of reading learning and implies understanding it as a truly democratizing experience. In this line, pedagogue Mar Esteve, in L’escola, casa de lectura, recalls that active reading includes the possibility of moral construction and the practice of hospitality.

In 1992, writer and professor Daniel Pennac published Com una novel·la, a highly influential essay interpreted as a plea for freedom in the way of reading. Based on his experience as a (bad) reader, the author desacralized the book through a decalogue of readers’ rights, which included options such as skipping pages, not finishing books, or reading anywhere. It is a decalogue that, thirty-four years later, no one would question, given the flexibility that has occurred both in classrooms and in the diversification of teaching methods, which favor the option of free and voluntary reading. Pedagogue Joan Portell and neuroscientist Michel Desmurget have collected various didactic proposals in Llegim? Com fer lectors entusiastes and Feu-los llegir! Més llibres i menys pantalles. Both defend the public utility of reading for pleasure, while denouncing the consequences that the decline in reading habits has on school performance.

In the West, the golden age of books, explains Martyn Lyons in Una historia de la lectura y de la escritura, took place between 1880 and 1930. It was during this period that the first massively literate generation accessed books. This access, however, implied a hierarchy based on reading choices. The readings of the heroes and heroines of the time help us identify them socially. Thus, for example, the reading tastes of La niña gorda (1917), by Santiago Rusiñol, daughter of a freethinker from Gràcia, are antagonistic to those of Zeni from Vals (1935), by Francesc Trabal, son of an industrial bourgeois. While the sentimental-themed serial novels will turn the Girl into a silly and ridiculous Madame Bovary, choosing Goethe allows Zeni to approach Joana, with the certainty of one who knows that the choice implies a sure courtship. In Trabal’s literature, reading books, recommending them, and exchanging them is an unmistakable mark of social identity. These exchanges also take place in fairly exclusive cultural spaces—Vera, another of the girls courted by Zeni, goes to the academy library knowing that “tradition held that a girl who read there, right there, twenty-three books, was not left to marry.”

Against an elitist view of the book and reading, pocket book editions were promoted, initiated by Penguin in 1935, and book clubs. The latter, in the sense of informal meetings to discuss a book, developed in the nineties and have become popular in recent years. Emulating television programs hosted by Bernard Pivot, Joaquín Soler Serrano, Emili Manzano, or Anna Guitart, clubs allow socializing what Montserrat Roig called “the shared vice of reading” and creating reading communities, which can be linked to specific themes or groups. In this sense, they imply an expansion of the spaces where we read and can be related to other collective reading initiatives, such as those collected by Thibault Le Page in Lire ensemble (2026), inspired by artistic practices, or the Lire pour Relier platform, created by Régine Detambel during the covid pandemic, a volunteer group of readers who, advised by psychologists, read literary works to inmates in residences. Meanwhile, the National Art Museum of Catalonia organizes Reading Parties, which combine a part of silent reading inside the museum with a talk on art and mental health. Gaining spaces, diversifying, and rooting within all of us, reading emancipates us and helps us understand the vital meaning of a culture.

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