Something changes in a book between the second and third readings. Not the storyline. Not the characters. The reader has something to say. One of my friends, a forties-year-old schoolteacher, once told me that the three novels she read before turning twenty were the source of her entire adult personality. When she said that, she laughed, but it wasn’t a joke.
If we sat still long enough to consider it, most of us might be able to do the same. Not because books are magical, but rather because reading is one of the few things we can do for hours on end without letting another person’s thoughts take over. That kind of intimacy is uncommon. You get the impression that someone has completely disappeared when you watch them read on a train, engrossed and unreachable, and in a sense, they have.
This has a term used by psychologists. According to narrative identity theory, people develop their sense of self in part through stories, even those they only read and didn’t live. Although the idea seems modest and almost uninteresting, its implications are peculiar. When a teen reads a novel about grief for the first time, they might be subtly developing the emotional vocabulary they’ll use at a real funeral decades later.
There’s a reason why Tuesdays with Morrie keeps coming up in these discussions, sometimes to the point of clichés. After reading it, readers don’t feel informed; rather, they feel as though their priorities were changed without their consent. Man’s Search for Meaning accomplishes a similar goal, albeit in a more somber and clinical manner. Frankl had no intention of consoling anyone. He was recording how meaning operated in situations where oxygen itself was in short supply, much like oxygen. Without realizing it, readers take in that reasoning.
I’ll try a more straightforward version because it’s more difficult to discuss this without coming across as sentimental. You perused a book. Nothing takes place. You shut it and head to the kitchen to prepare dinner. However, a minor modification has taken place, a slightly different approach to decision-making, a phrase you’ll use the following week without realizing where it originated. When you do that several hundred times over the course of a lifetime, the accumulation begins to resemble character.
The picture is complicated by representation, which is probably a good thing. When a reader doesn’t come across a character who looks like them, they learn a subtler, less evident lesson: their own narrative is marginalized. Children’s books have historically underrepresented disabled characters, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters of color, sometimes in a negative way. Industry data on this is still inconsistent, but it’s not encouraging. When readers do eventually find themselves on the page, they frequently describe the experience in strangely physical terms, such as crying, feeling seen, or suddenly feeling less alone in a room they had been sitting in for years.
Here, too, there is a selection bias that is worth acknowledging. We don’t choose books at random. The books that mold us are, in a way, books we partially choose to be shaped by because familiarity bias draws us to authors and genres we already trust. Readers seem to think their taste is neutral, while investors seem to think markets are efficient. Neither is entirely accurate.
Compared to grief memoirs or wartime philosophy, Susan Cain’s study of introversion, Quiet, has a more subdued effect on readers. No one is asked to change by it. It requests that they cease expressing regret for their current selves. That’s a different kind of shaping, more akin to permission than sculpture.
Whether or not any of this can be accurately measured is still up for debate. Perhaps it’s the quiet that matters. The most important books hardly ever make an announcement. They simply wait to be picked up again on a typical Tuesday while sitting on the shelf with their spines cracked. Despite the lack of any formalities, they manage to continue working.
