Reading helps us to write better and communicate better. Knowing how those who really knew how to do it in their day expressed themselves helps us to develop our own style. It helps us to be able to dazzle people, so that they are able to read a long article of many pages without almost letting it go. Or that the general public can read a one-and-a-half-page article, which is a very low bar.
Reading helps to avoid spelling mistakes. Because those who read are less likely to mess up in the noble art of putting each letter where it belongs. Besides, there is no greater mark of ignorance than the obscene and obsessive insistence on not writing well and not wanting to do so. But good spelling also helps to express oneself better and to express oneself more, because those who consciously make spelling mistakes find puns that those who do not read are unaware of. A spelling mistake is not the same as a spelling error. Besides, the one who deliberately misspells is also the master of irony because he can write paragraphs like this one criticizing what he himself is guilty of. That hyphen is without tilde.
Reading helps to make life not so boring. It is what rosemary and thyme are to chicken and rice. Those who read are able to express themselves with greater opulence. Because it is not the same to say that you have a headache (as any mortal would say) as that “on my forehead, the drums of a formless torment thunder, and every thought is an arrow that vibrates between temple and temple”. Because the one who says the former passes through life without pain or glory and the latter will do so with pain and glory. And neither is it the same to say that something does not matter to you as “you make a lot of noise to me, my friend, but your business gives me less care than the shadow that chases the wind”. The first is vulgar and vulnerable to the passage of time, the second assures you a place, at least, in the Olympus of peculiarity.
Reading is useful to travel around, to Gulliver’s worlds, to Macondo or to Jandula without having to take a cheap plane at 6 a.m. on a Friday and stay in a speculative apartment where you wait for the time of the free tour to get to know the most hidden corners only known by the millions of tourists who visit every European capital. Books take us to other worlds, to other places where we can reflect on our own lives and learn other points of view that we can then apply to our real experiences when we close the book. I once met a psychiatrist who reminded me of the gypsy Melquíades from One Hundred Years of Solitude. He drew a parallel between the brain and a mansion and said that for every book we read, a new room opens up for us. But of course, even if it’s great to have a very big house with many rooms, the more rooms, the more places to maintain and the more chances you have of being robbed. So maybe it wouldn’t hurt to put an advertisement on the covers of the books, like the one for tobacco. Something that says “Reading seriously harms your health and that of those around you”, but it would be something very intense, it would do a disservice to reading and would perpetuate the stereotype that readers are a nuisance. I insist: stereotype, lest any of you think that I really mean it when I say that we are all a bunch of nincompoops.
So reading is like Swiss Army knives with knife, spoon and screwdriver that neither cuts, nor serves to eat nor unscrews, or like the Adidas 3-in-1 shower gels that we men buy that are gel, shampoo and toothpaste and do not clean the hair, nor the body, nor the mouth. They do everything, but they are useless. That’s right, reading is useless.
