A Society of Readers Depends on Adults Creating New Readers

Ann Patchett treats reading as the love of her life, but not as a private refuge that can be left to individual taste. Her central claim is more demanding: if people want to live in a society where people read, they have a responsibility to help create readers.

That responsibility, as Patchett describes it, is practical before it is sentimental. Read to children as others once read to you. Buy books for children in Title I schools who may not have books of their own; she says Parnassus Books does a lot of this. Speak out against book banning, because, in her formulation, books are not what endanger children. Speak up for teachers and librarians doing the work they were trained to do.

And then do the simplest visible thing: read a book.

If people wish others would read books instead of constantly scrolling on their phones, Patchett says, then they should read books. If parents want their children to become readers, they should model that behavior. Reading aloud matters, but children also need to see adults reading.

Her argument is not that example alone solves the cultural problem. It is that a reading culture is reproduced by concrete acts: reading to children, putting books in the hands of children who may not own them, defending the adults who teach and lend books, and making reading visible at home. Complaining that people do not read is not enough. The conditions for reading have to be maintained.

Patchett came to that public posture from a private love. Books, she says, have been her “steadfast companions,” her solace, teachers, and joy. She cannot imagine life without reading. Her need to share that love has become strong enough to outweigh what she calls her significant need for privacy. She describes herself as “pretty much every day, in every situation” sharing “the good news.”

The religious language is deliberate. Patchett’s model for literary evangelism is not a bookseller or a teacher, but a Hare Krishna she met in Chicago O’Hare in 1986, when she was 22 and traveling home to Nashville after her first semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was carrying a Hermes 3000 typewriter, “technically portable at 14 pounds,” because she wrote stories, and a shoulder bag of zinc plates for printmaking — plates she describes as heavier than the typewriter and “sharp as meat cleavers.”

Lost in the airport, she accepted help from a young man who carried her bags across the concourses. Only after they had started walking did he tell her he did not have a flight. He “worked” in the airport, sort of: he was a Hare Krishna. Patchett says she was terrified, though she undercuts the fear by asking what exactly she imagined might happen — that he would kidnap her and make her a vegetarian, when she already was one. She kept walking in part because he had her typewriter, “and I was in love with my typewriter.”

Her flight was delayed two hours. The man stayed with her. Patchett says she would not have chosen to spend two hours in O’Hare with a Hare Krishna and lacked the courage to leave, so she listened. Listening, she says, is an essential skill for a novelist and for human beings generally.

What she heard was not mainly doctrine. It was an account of devotion: someone who loved God enough to stand all day in an airport trying to tell strangers about that love. People rushed past him. Even after he had stopped wearing traditional saffron robes to soften first impressions, they hid behind newspapers when he began speaking. He kept showing up anyway, because God’s love was the greatest thing he had known and he wanted to share it.

Patchett told the story for years as a memorable airport encounter: two hours in O’Hare with a Hare Krishna. As she got older, she says, she began to see herself becoming him. Not in theology, but in the compulsion to testify about the force that had most sustained her. For him, it was God’s love. For her, it is reading.

Ann Patchett’s private love for books became a public project in 2011, when Nashville’s two major bookstores closed. She says she waited for someone else to open a bookstore. When no one did, she decided to do it herself.

She is explicit that opening Parnassus Books was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It was, in her word, “irritation.” People told her bookstores were dead and that books themselves were moving toward cultural irrelevance. Patchett’s answer is blunt: “Heresy.” Books, she says, are “the rock on which I built my church.”

She does not present the store as an entrepreneurial romance or a rescue mission for herself. She already had books and believed she would always have them. The fight, as she describes it, was for other people.

Before opening Parnassus, Patchett went on tour for her novel State of Wonder and used the trip as a fact-finding mission. She had been touring regularly since 1992, and she asked booksellers what she needed to know. The most valuable advice, she says, came from Daniel Goldin of Boswell Books in Milwaukee.

Some of Goldin’s advice was comic and operational: people are desperate to buy anything hanging from the ceiling. More importantly, he told her to put the children’s section as far from the front door as possible, so that if a child made a break for it, staff would have the maximum opportunity to catch her.

Goldin’s larger point was strategic: if a bookstore wants customers, it has to raise them. Small children come to storytime, are read to, learn to read themselves, and grow up into customers. Fifteen years later, Patchett says, that has proved true at Parnassus. The store has “raised up a raft of customers.”

Her interpretation of that advice has changed. She no longer thinks of it mainly as cultivating shoppers. She thinks of it as cultivating readers — not just for the books she writes, and not just for the books she sells, but for all books.

The bookstore is Patchett’s principal example, not the limit of the obligation. Her broader claim is that anyone who wants to live among readers has work to do. The store is also one form of social infrastructure: a place built around books that does not merely sell them, but helps create the conditions in which people learn to read, keep reading, and meet one another through reading.

Ann Patchett does not deny that technology has changed attention or information. She asks whether books remain relevant in what she calls a “golden age of technology,” then answers by distinguishing information from form.

Her image is simple: every piece of information coming from a computer or phone is a single thread. At any given moment, a person is holding countless threads, ranging in quality from vital to worthless. A novelist’s work is to take those threads and weave them into a tapestry. Patchett’s examples — maidens, unicorns, pear trees — make the point that fiction is not merely information in longer sentences. It is arrangement, pattern, and imaginative structure.

That distinction carries the argument about why novels still matter. They put readers inside another person’s life, which is how Patchett says they teach empathy. They also define history by showing how people have changed and will continue to change. She invokes Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Updike at that point, without elaborating further on the comparison.

The same distinction carries her argument about attention. Books help develop and preserve what she calls a “long-format brain.” The problems of the world, she argues, cannot be seen “one thread at a time,” and they cannot be solved that way either. Reading strengthens the capacity to think with depth and complexity; she contrasts that capacity with consuming thought in units of 280 characters at a time.

Patchett does not frame this as an instant cure. Returning to novels after time away may feel strange, she says. Her advice is to stay with it. What a reader puts in is what the reader gets back.

One of the surprises of owning Parnassus, Ann Patchett says, is that people do not come in only for books. Reading is solitary, but in her experience the bookstore has shown that reading can become a means of connection.

She gives concrete examples. The store’s monthly book club has grown so large that it has been split into three sections. There is also a classics book club and a romance book club. Once a year, those two groups meet in the middle and read a classic romance; most recently, that book was Pride and Prejudice.

Author events have ranged from Jeff Kinney to Percival Everett to Barbara Kingsolver to R.F. Kuang to Ina Garten to Bono. Patchett’s point is not the celebrity of the guests but the breadth of the readership. Presidential histories and mysteries alike give people a starting point for conversation. The conversations may begin with books, she says, but they go everywhere.

Reading, in this account, does more than preserve attention and complexity. It interrupts isolation. Patchett describes books as shining a light that disrupts “the dark isolation” many people find themselves in. Her instruction is direct: go to a local bookstore and see it.

The bookstore becomes more than a place of sale. It is a place where the solitary act of reading gives people a reason to gather, talk, and meet others without requiring that those people already be alike.

That last point returns to the Hare Krishna in O’Hare. Patchett says that every time she changes planes there, she thinks of him: a person she feared, a person she believed she had nothing in common with, and a person whose only intention was to help her — both to find her gate and to find a force in the world larger than herself.

She now understands them as parallel figures in different faiths. He came to see himself as part of the larger human fabric through religious faith. She came to that understanding through another kind of faith, centered on books.

If she met him again, Patchett imagines sitting at the gate longer. She would ask what he was reading. She would tell him she admired the courage of his convictions. And she would thank him for helping her find her way.