How—and Why—to Read For Joy

A few years ago, long before there was a pandemic, I decided I needed a battle cry.

And so I picked READ FOR JOY.

It was advice to myself—but also to everybody else. It was something I’d discovered, after a lifetime of being a dedicated devotee of reading, that I wanted to share with other people. It was one of the smartest things I’d ever figured out about how to live a happy, nourishing life, and I felt like I shouldn’t hoard the insight.

I couldn’t really have anticipated how much we’d come to need that advice.

But we definitely need it now.

[Reading for joy is] not reading only ‘happy’ stories—but giving yourself permission to read what you want and trusting yourself to find the stories you need.

Here we are, suddenly, in the middle of a pandemic that’s raging out of control. People are scared, worried, grieving, anxious. We’re surrounded by uncertainty and despair. Forty percent of us are officially depressed.

And so, I’m doubling-down. Read for joy.

There’s a quote I love from Nora Ephron:

Reading is escape—and the opposite of escape.

Reading takes us away from our lives but also connects us more deeply to them. It focuses on others but somehow teaches us about ourselves. It turns us both outward and inward at the same time.

But it matters what you read. The right stories at the right time can be exactly the balm you’re looking for—and the wrong stories can put you off reading altogether.

That’s why now, more than ever, you should read for fun. Read for pleasure. Read what you feel like reading. What grabs your interest.

Whatever that might be.

When you find those stories—the right ones for you on a soul-deep level—it feels right. It feels good. It feels like joy.

If you think about it, reading really is a loaded thing. We did it all through school growing up, and we got judged and graded endlessly on our abilities. It’s fine. It is what it is. Reading is important, and it needs to be one of the Three Rs.

But academic reading is not the only good reading. Literary reading is not the only reading that matters. I don’t know about you, but I absorbed an idea from school that stories existed in a hierarchy, with Camus and Kafka and Tolstoy up at the top, and, I don’t know . . . maybe category romances down at the bottom. As if stories could be ranked, linearly, from “good” to “bad.”

But then I grew up and figured something out—stories aren’t a hierarchy; stories are a universe. There are all different kinds of good.

In adulthood, after...

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