Why we read

I cannot remember the first book that truly belonged to me.

Not the first one I owned, nor the first one I was made to read at school, but the first that felt as though it had arrived carrying some quiet knowledge about the world that I did not yet possess. I have tried, over the years, to remember its title. Sometimes I convince myself it was borrowed from the school library. Other times I am certain it came from a shelf in my parents’s study, its pages already softened by someone else’s hands. Perhaps it was rescued from a second-hand bookshop, bought for a few rand and forgotten until the right afternoon. The details have blurred. The feeling has not.

I remember finishing it and looking around the room as though something ought to have changed. Of course, nothing had. The blinds still moved in the breeze. The kettle still boiled. Outside, the neighbourhood carried on with the indifference that neighbourhoods have towards private revelations. Yet the world had shifted, if only by a fraction. It was the first time I understood that a stranger could write a sentence decades before I was born and somehow know exactly where to find me. Ever since then, I have been suspicious of the idea that people read to escape.

If reading were simply a means of leaving the world behind, surely we would return lighter than when we began. Instead, the opposite seems to happen. We finish a novel carrying another person’s grief, another family’s disappointments, another generation’s impossible choices. We inherit lives we have not lived and somehow become responsible for remembering them. Perhaps that is why the books we love are rarely the easiest ones.

As I have grown older, I find myself returning to books that refuse certainty. The ones that ask more than they answer. They have a habit of reappearing at inconvenient moments. Waiting at a red light on Oxford Road. Standing in the queue at Woolworths behind someone buying flowers. Watching a little girl disappear into the children’s section of a bookshop with the confidence of someone who already knows where she belongs. A sentence remembered years later has a peculiar way of interrupting ordinary life.

I have stopped trying to explain why we read. Every explanation eventually feels too tidy. Some books arrive because we are lonely. Others because we are curious. Some because grief has made us reach for language larger than our own. And some, I suspect, because we happen to pull the right spine from the shelf on an otherwise forgettable Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps books choose their readers after all.

The older I become, the more I realise that I remember books rather as I remember people. Not always in sequence, and rarely in full. I remember a conversation before I remember a face. A single sentence before I remember an entire plot. The feeling of closing a novel long before I can recall how it ended. They become part of the furniture of an inner life, quietly rearranging it without asking permission.

Somewhere, as I write this, there is a book I have not yet read. Its pages have yellowed slightly. Someone else’s name is written inside the cover. It has travelled through hands I will never shake and lived on shelves I will never see. Perhaps it has already changed three lives before it reaches mine. I like the thought that books travel this way.

Not in straight lines, but through people. Passed between friends. Left behind on bedside tables. Lent and never returned. Found when they are no longer being looked for. They remind us that reading has never really been about finding answers. It has always been about joining a conversation that began long before we arrived, and will continue long after we have quietly turned the final page.