Is reading art?

(Image: Reading at a table. Oil on Canvas, Picasso 1934)

Reading is the thing I’ve always preferred over any other occupation and often with a sense of guilt, so it was a delight to read that Ursula K. Le Guin in her book “The Wave in the Mind” believes that reading is art!

Le Guin says, — and I identify with this statement with a passion — “Reading is active. To read is to tell the story, tell it yourself … A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, translating arbitrary symbols into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one.”

A bookshop in Fort Collins is paying people to sit and read for two hours a week.
Perelandra Bookshop has a reader-in-residence scheme. The reader commits to reading at the store for two hours per week in exchange for a small coffee and book stipend.

The reader-in-residence isn’t expected to produce anything. They don’t have to write an essay. They don’t have to host a book club or moderate a panel discussion. They don’t have to contribute to a blog or create sponsored content. They don’t have to do anything, except show up at the bookstore a couple of times per week and read.

Joe Braun, the principal book buyer at Perelandra, and the person who dreamed up the position says, “The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully.”

Joe is quietly encouraging people to experience what Ursula Le Guinn explains: “Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader — she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story, refuse to go along with it, make judgement, revise her judgements, and has time and room to genuinely interact.”

Most other art forms produce something that others can passively view, listen to, watch or ignore, but in reading, the imagination, the writer, and the reader make unique experiences.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I’m happy to be that sort of artist!