Recognize the importance of reading books you don't like

Have you ever wondered why it is important to read books whose ideas you don't like? You might say, why should I read a book that expresses an idea I don't agree with? It sounds like a fair question. After all, we live our lives through boycotts.

We don't buy products from brands we don't support, we don't read newspapers that don't follow the principle of impartial reporting, we don't even follow people whose views we don't like. The sanctioning power of a boycott is undeniable, of course, but could it be that boycotting books is unintentionally harming us? Could we be limiting ourselves in terms of information?

Limiting ourselves to speech bubbles of like-minded people might make us less irritable during the day. However, when we do the same with books, we are less likely to be good readers. In an article published last month, Pamela Paul, the books editor of The New York Times, talked about the importance of reading books by authors we are biased against, or books that we turn a few pages and put down because of the ideas they contain.

First of all, it should be noted: This is not about taking a sneaky pleasure in reading a work of low literary merit, or putting down a book that we thought was good but disappointed us and moving on to another. It's about not reading a book whose premise we find contradictory just because of that. In other words, being completely closed to a new point of view. We can have many reasons to read a book we don't like.

I have selected five of them for you.

These books are very important because they remind you what your true values are, says Pamela Paul. "Throughout the work you enter the author's world and head, you experience how he or she feels and thinks. This is a very good way to understand what makes you feel uncomfortable and what thoughts and behaviors you value. Paul gives an example from his own experience and says that he never was and never will be a libertarian, and that he realized this through the disgust he felt reading Ayn Rand's The Source of Life (formerly The World Created).

This revulsion, of course, does not mean that the book is bad. Quite the opposite! The fact that the reader experiences the emotion that the book aims to create in extremes can be considered proof of the success of the book. It's like reading Goethe's immortal work, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther's inner troubles, which he cannot overcome, bore you to the point of putting the book down...

You may have disliked a book you didn't read at the right time just because of that. Maybe you didn't really understand it, maybe you found the characters annoying. Your views while reading the book may not have reached maturity yet. It is a good idea to give books another chance after some time has passed.

You have the opportunity to understand how much you have matured personally and as a reader by giving the books you disliked a chance. A book that you can tolerate on rereading may help you to see that you have become a more tolerant person with different views over time.

You become a more knowledgeable reader. Becoming a good reader means giving books on all subjects, whether you are interested in them or not, a chance. Let me underline that in order to criticize something, you need to have an opinion about it.

Reading these books is also useful for defending the views you think are right. Getting inside the heads of people with opposing views helps you to understand their way of thinking and expression, and therefore to strengthen your own argument.