Eustace Clarence Scrubb almost deserved his name. At the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, readers quickly identify him as a fussy know-it-all who hates authority and suffers from an impoverished imagination. Midway through the story, Eustace finds himself transformed into a dragon as an outward symbol of his inner state. How does a boy end up like this, draconic inside and out, hating and hated by others? In part, Lewis says, because “Eustace had read none of the right books” (463).
Really? How does that work? Lewis knew (as all the wise do) that one of the most significant influences on character is what one reads:
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend [i.e., a person with poor reading habits]. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. (An Experiment in Criticism, 140)
In other words, you are what you read. We’ve all heard, “You are what you eat,” the principle being that your diet determines what you become. The same holds true for your reading intake. Like the plate, the page shapes us. If you imagine each book like a meal and each article a light snack, what you consume and digest day in and day out, over years and decades, molds your character.
So, how do reading habits sculpt you into a particular kind of person?
Whom You Hang With
First, we must realize that though we often read by ourselves, we never read alone. When you open up a book, you sit down with an author. The book is fundamentally a technology of conversation; it fosters the meeting of minds across time and space. The written word captures something of the author and, when read, conjures him. “All writers, by the way they use language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. . . . All writing is communication . . . it is the Self escaping into the open” (The Elements of Style, 97–98). In short, when you read, you hang out with an author.
This insight enables us to bring to bear the pervasive biblical principle that you become whom you hang out with. Your companions stamp their imprint on you. Habitually hanging with bad company will sand away the contours of good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33). On the other hand, when holy ones congregate, their love and good works spread like a good contagion (Hebrews 10:24–25).
Proverbs may have the most to say about the transformative power of companions. Befriend a wise man and end up wise; loiter around fools and you will contract folly (Proverbs 13:20). And Jesus says that everyone who follows a teacher — that is, watches his way of life and receives his words — will become like him for good or evil (Luke 6:40). This is the essence of reading. As Mortimer Adler explains, “Reading is learning from an absent teacher” (How to Read a Book, 16).
So, if our companions and teachers shape us, and if in every book an author offers us such company, is it any wonder books hold the magic that can make or break us, that can mold us into a Eustace or a Lewis? Yet we still have not said how this enchantment works. How do we become what we read? The books we read have a twofold effect: They train our desires and frame the way we perceive reality.
Books Condition Desires
At the beginning of The Inferno, Dante enters the circle of hell where adulterers suffer the consequences of their sins. Just as they were blown about by lustful passions in life, in death a hellish cyclone whirls and whips them about. During a brief lull in the storm, the pilgrim Dante meets Francesca and Paolo. They tell their story of “love,” an irresistible passion that seized them, tossed them into an adulterous bed, and ultimately led to their untimely deaths. Dante asks Francesca what caused them to indulge this “love.” It turns out their illicit affair was sparked by a book.
Francesca and Paolo steeped themselves in the literature of chivalry, which celebrates adultery. One day, the two were alone, reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the story made sin so appealing that they wanted to try. Carried away by their lust, they eventually ended up where Dante finds them — in hell. In the final scene, Francesca laments, “A pander was that author, and his book!” (Inferno, 5.137).
Dante here warns us in a shocking way that books condition desires. They teach us what to want. Through the power of words, books can make almost anything look attractive and thus desirable. Stories and poetry especially affect us because they appeal to the imagination, and the imagination, as the organ of meaning, largely determines what we find worthy of pursuit. This is exactly what happened to Francesca and Paolo (and Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and so many others). Feeding on a diet of adultery-promoting stories, they became what they read. Beware, reader: The modern genre of smut or erotica has the same effect — and the same end.
Books put pressure on our desires. They can teach us to want well or to want poorly, but none is neutral. Like living companions, authors act as mediators of desire; unlike them, they wield the particularly potent magic of the written word, inviting us to enter into their experiences, to participate in their worlds, to live with their characters, and to test-drive their worldviews. Books make the man because books catechize desires.
Books Frame Reality
In the pantheon of good fiction, Don Quixote sits right at the top. Miguel Cervantes’s mad knight and his stout sidekick remain two of the most beloved characters of all time. In this sprawling adventure, Cervantes circles around one central theme: the effect of literature on character.
The novel starts with Don Quixote, a respectable gentleman who picks up the habit of devouring books of chivalry. He read so many that “with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind” (21). Cervantes makes it clear that Don Quixote is not mad in the sense of being insane; he’s mad in that he sees reality exclusively through the lens of fantasy books.
This madness emerges clearly in the infamous windmill incident. Shortly after setting out in pursuit of adventure with his servant Sancho Panza, Don Quixote encounters a line of windmills. However, because “everything our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to happen according to what he had read” (26), he cannot (or will not) see the windmills as windmills. Instead, they tower before him as evil giants begging to be conquered. Thus, the valiant knight vows to engage them in “fierce and unequal combat” (58).
Sancho Panza, who had not read any chivalric books, tries to convince Don Quixote that mere windmills stand before them, but the mad knight cannot escape the influence of his books. “It seems clear to me,” Don Quixote responds, “that thou art not well-versed in the matter of adventures” (58). With this, he spurs his horse, lowers his lance, and charges one of the windmills just as a gust of wind catches the sail. His lance gets tangled in the fabric, sending both knight and steed flying through the air. Both end up much the worse for wear, only to suffer Sancho’s (rightful), “Didn’t I tell you?”
Hidden in the humor, amid the tangled wreck of horse and man, Cervantes’s point is clear: Books have the power to frame our reality. What Don Quixote read, he saw. This is his madness throughout the novel. Yet his madness is not peculiar to him — and perhaps it’s not even so mad. Books affect all of us in a similar manner. Leland Ryken explains,
The stories we embrace define us. Narrative scholars commonly assert that the stories we choose to read define who we are, but we also become the products of the stories we read. Stories reflect individual identity and have the power to modify it. This is also true for societies and nations. Stories form a chief means through which groups codify, preserve, and pass on their beliefs and values. (Recovering the Lost Art of Reading, 71)
Books put us face to face with authors. And every author presupposes things about man, the world, and God before the pen ever touches the page. Never neutral, they “do more than present human experiences; they interpret them” (Recovering the Lost Art, 59). Over time, the diet of books we consume and the companionship of their authors change the way we see the world. They can shrink our vision to almost nothing or expand it immeasurably. They can warp or straighten, drain or fill, color or desaturate.
Like Eustace, if you cannot imagine a dragon, you won’t fight one. You’ll fail to recognize devouring evil, like enemies that kill infants, castrate children, and traffic in souls. You won’t take up arms against your own draconic inclinations. You’ll see a world free from foes of goodness and truth.
Like Don Quixote, if you can’t avoid imagining giants, you won’t stop fighting. You’ll charge headlong into prudence issues as if they were matters of black and white. You’ll take up arms against fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. You’ll deem combat the only fit response for difficult family members.
Books provide the habitual furniture of the mind. They frame reality.
Befriend Good Books
How do books shape us? They shape us by putting us in close proximity to their authors — men and women who make certain things desirable, who see the world in a particular way, who are never neutral. In the pages of their books, we sit with them and eat from their table. We dwell with them. Alan Jacobs summarizes the effect well: “To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices” (How to Think, 63).
So, my friend, be careful what you read. Don’t malnourish your imagination. Don’t glut your passions. Attend to your diet. Single meals are not as important as habitual trends. A Twinkie (that fitness post on Instagram, that rant on Facebook, that thriller novel) is fine every once in a while; it might kill you if that’s all you eat. What to read comes down to maturity, discernment, and wise counsel. Your choice of companions is a matter of life and death (Proverbs 12:26). So choose wisely. Befriend good books. Don’t become a Scrubb by reading the wrong books; instead, “Stay close to good men and become one” (Don Quixote, 667).
Desiring God