Reading books is a symbiotic act

Intermezzo, Infinite Jest, Lord of the Rings, and well-loved books. (Issue #428)  
  
## Reading books is a symbiotic act

#### Intermezzo, Infinite Jest, Lord of the Rings, and well-loved books. (Issue #428)

By The Medium Blog ∙ May 13, 2026 ∙ 5 min read ∙ View on MediumIf writing — actual human writing! — is the most important skill of the A.I. age, then where does that put reading?In Why reading “The Decameron” is as useful as ever, Nikolaus Correll writes that while reading is increasingly important (reading is, after all, how we primarily interact with the internet and A.I.), the type of reading we are doing is actually quite shallow. _What_ you’re reading matters, too:[Artificial intelligence] compresses entire books into a page, entire arguments into a paragraph, entire traditions into bullet points…. why read the original when the essence can be extracted instantly? Or maybe there is something deeper hidden in these original texts?For the voracious readers on Medium, the relationship between them and the books they read is sacred. Let’s explore those bonds.···Books have an extraordinary power to permanently affect us. Their impact on our psyche, whether they are nonfiction or fiction, cannot be underestimated._—_ _Sarah Olson_ _,__Should Bookstores Carry Problematic Books?_ ···

### How books imprint on us

“From 2020 to 2023, I spent three years essentially pretending to read books,” writes Patrick Daly.Daly tried to pick up the habit of reading again in a fit of pandemic-induced self-improvement, but he found himself struggling. He picked up David Foster Wallace’s _Infinite Jest_ on the recommendation of a friend, which “beat him into submission.” Rather than give up or “staring at the pages for an arbitrary amount of time,” Daly decided to just keep going:Yes, any book that takes 1000+ pages to relay its contents is going to try your patience, but the type of patience I’m talking about has more to do with obscurity than just the passage of time — the type of patience that asks that you sit in discomfort and rewards you for doing so with eventual hard-won epiphanies, unceremoniously sliding you a single piece of information that suddenly clicks into place hours or days or weeks of reading, thinking, grappling, and ruminating you either thought was in vein or didn’t realize was happening at all.That’s the power of our relationship with reading. It’s not a one way street; we both interpret and are interpreted. And that is why reading books, not just summaries, are going to be the support column of the AI future.···The day I was leaving for Monkey Bay, my father whispered into my ear, “Study very hard. I want you to be a doctor.” I nodded my head in agreement, but deep down in my heart, I wanted to be a writer._— Nixon Mateulah in_ _The Kalahari Review_ _,__To All the Books I’ve Loved Before_ ···

### How we imprint ourselves on books

A recent Stockholm book club meeting about Sally Rooney’s _Intermezzo_ had writer Lena Blomkvist considering what we bring of ourselves to the books we read. “Book interpretation is the responsibility of a reader — and that reader is me,” she writes. “What does _Intermezzo_ tell me about myself?”Blomkvist, a self-described “woman shaking with feminist rage,” argues that much of the book is purposefully written with the male gaze in mind — citing an unnamed girlfriend in which central characters Peter and Ivan “are less interested in [her name] than in the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra at dinner.” Some of her fellow, male book club members failed to pick this up, but Blomkvist says this is intentional: “So what’s going on in a man’s head? How do you write about it in a way that men won’t even realize something’s not quite right?”“I see all these — maybe even non-existent — meanings because when I read _Intermezzo_ , I don’t read it as Peter or Ivan,” she writes; she reads it as the other named and unnamed female characters.For Colin Mathers, who first read the Lord of the Rings trilogy fifty years ago and is rereading them now, his lived experience has given him a newfound appreciation for Tolkien’s prose, “the brilliance of his creation,” and the little details that make Middle Earth seem real. But it’s the changing _real_ world that has given Mathers a new understanding:The LOTR is the perfect story for the current crisis that besets a world which is increasingly declining into autocracy and war. Set in a world of epic heroes and villains but focusing on the ordinary folk, the hobbits, who aren’t made for adventure, but when it comes down to it, do the right thing and persevere with no real hope of success. They just keep going, because they understand that there’s good in this world worth fighting.The act of reading a book is a conversation between different perspectives — it is past, present, context, lived experience, and culture from both author and reader. Who and how we relate to the book depends on the moment in time, and all the moments leading up to it.···

### A final thought

You can make anything more fun; the secret is creating permission for people to play. Sam Liberty, who gets hired by organizations to gamify workshops and trainings for organizations, offers this advice in his piece How to Make Any Activity Fun:Fun loosens your thinking. Creative problems don’t get solved by clenched jaws; they get solved when people feel safe enough to say something weird out loud. Every good brainstorm I have ever been in had a moment of absurdity in it, and that moment was load-bearing.···Interested in more literary conversations on Medium? Check out publications like Kalahari Review, Lit Life, Books Are Our Superpower, Counter Arts, or peruse the Books and Reading tag.··· _Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter.__Sign up here_ _.__Edited and produced by_ _brandon echter_, Carly Rose Gillis, and Scott Lamb._Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and_ _join a community that believes in human storytelling_ _._

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