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A psychologist claims that the fascination it exerts is due to the fact that it creates a mysterious world, in which only one can travel
A few years ago, the Newspaper Association of America coined a phrase to promote it reading in the United States: “Reading is the new hot thing”, thus spreading the idea that this is an interesting and attractive activity.
Reading today is said to be sailing among an ocean of images and digital screens, which give ready-made information to a passive, non-interactive and non-participating audience. Books and all print media are now fighting a great battle for survival.
However, it was not always like this. Once upon a time, reading was an integral part of people’s lives, at least those who had the opportunity to be educated. As Silvia Hurtado González, professor at the Department of Spanish Literature at the University of Valladolid, recalls, St. Augustine describes in his memoirs, at the end of the 4th century, the thoughts that the image of St. Ambrose reading silently evoked in him: “As he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart sought sensation, but his voice and tongue were silent. Many times we saw him reading like this to himself». Irene Vallejo comments on this: “Augustine realizes that this reader is not at his side, despite their spatial proximity, but has escaped into another, freer and more fluid world of his own choosing, traveling without moving and without revealing his whereabouts to anyone».
Many centuries later, on a summer day in 1955, Eve Arnold, a famous photographer of the time will capture the diva Marilyn Monroe to read. That wasn’t the point of the photoshoot, but the photographer couldn’t resist the sight of the star reading. These photos gave Monroe the opportunity to combat, to some extent, her image as a “naive blonde”.
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Relatively recently, finally, the dating site eHarmony concluded that profiles of users who listed reading as one of their hobbies were more attractive for the opposite sex. Specifically, the data revealed that men who listed reading as one of their interests received 19% more messages, while for women the same percentage was limited to 3%.
All of these examples serve to show that reading is really an activity that fascinates others and is considered – strange as it may seem – sexy.
According to author Jeanette Winterson, the reading she’s sexy because “the feeling it exudes is that of total concentration and nothing is sexier than that». What Winterson is really talking about is the fascination of any reader’s image.
From a psychological point of view, there may be some explanation for people’s fascination with reading. Cristian Vázquez tries to justify this by saying: “What we like in a man who reads is to see him immersed in an unknown world, which has nothing to do with the environment around him, a world about which we can get only minimal information, through the expressions which takes on the face of the reader as he reads. In other words, the reader’s face is a kind of window into the world the book creates».
Winterson characterizes this mysterious nature of reading as the absolute act of privacy and intimacy, adding that reading gives us the ability to become inaccessible and inaccessible.
Reading a book is, after all, the ideal time to give ourselves the opportunity to get lost in the emotions and fantasies that come from reading. Because, as Emily Dickinson said: “There is no better means of traveling to faraway places than a good book».