Reading for its own sake

Many of my friends in the teaching fraternity were happy to hear author Amitav Ghosh tell a young woman that the best advice he had for a writer-in-the-making was “to read.” It’s something we keep telling our own students, but it is one advice that is disregarded the most. “Studying is an advanced form of reading,” says one contributor on quora.com. Wikipedia defines reading as “the act or process of studying.” But let us set aside those academic or dictionary distinctions, for the time being, and get to what I mean by reading. There is a difference between this and reading for the purpose of knowledge acquisition — although I would argue that reading of all kinds leads to knowledge gain in the long run. Over time, as we I hate to think that I am advocating reading for pleasure as a way to improve one’s ability to read academically — that would seem to be self-defeating!