Reading Is Useless

So what does happen? Shawky-Milcent, drawing on decades of readers' testimonies and on her own students, describes an experience that is almost embarrassingly intimate. A reader disappears into a book and comes back changed in ways they couldn't have predicted and can't fully report. A sentence lodges somewhere and stays for years. A character's grief becomes indistinguishable from one's own. None of this maps onto a competency. It happens in a zone the exam can't reach.

She leans on a strange and precise fact of reading: we do not receive a novel, we co-produce it. The writer supplies the words; the reader supplies the faces, the rooms, the weather, the voice. Every reader of Anna Karenina builds a different Anna out of the same sentences, assembled from the raw material of their own memory and longing. The book becomes, briefly, a collaboration between the author and a single private mind — which is why the same page can devastate one person and leave another cold, and why neither reading is wrong.

There's an obvious objection, and Shawky-Milcent knows it. If reading changes people, consoles them, deepens them — isn't that useful, in the end? Hasn't she just relocated the benefit rather than abolished it? Her answer is careful, and it's the hinge of the whole argument. The moment you read in order to obtain those things, they stop arriving. You cannot open a novel to be consoled and expect consolation; you cannot mine a book for empathy and come out more empathetic. The gifts appear only when you're not shopping for them.

This is the paradox she wants to protect. Reading's deepest effects are real, but they're byproducts — they arrive sideways, as the surplus of an activity undertaken for its own sake. Announce the goal in advance and you install the reader as an evaluator again, standing outside the experience, checking whether it's delivering. And the experience only exists for someone who has stopped checking, who has let the book have them. The utilitarian defense, however well-meant, keeps the reader forever on the doorstep of the thing it's recommending.

Step back from the classroom and the argument widens into something larger than a debate about pedagogy. What Shawky-Milcent is really defending, under the banner of uselessness, is interiority — the existence of an inner life that answers to no metric, produces no output, and belongs to no one but its owner. In a culture that has learned to measure and optimize nearly everything, from sleep to steps to attention, a private experience that resists measurement isn't a quaint leftover. It's close to a form of resistance.

The stakes are sharpest for the young readers she teaches, who are growing up inside an economy of the visible. Feeds reward what can be shown; grades reward what can be scored; even leisure increasingly arrives as content to be consumed and shared. Reading a novel, alone, silently, for no one, is one of the few remaining acts that leaves no trace and asks for no audience. Nothing is posted. Nothing is graded. Something happens, and only the reader knows it happened. That secrecy, she argues, is not incidental — it's where the self does its quiet, ungovernable work.

The teacher who wrote this book still gives grades, still prepares her students for the exam, still teaches the free indirect style. She isn't calling for the classroom to be dismantled. She's asking it, and the wider culture around it, to hold two things at once: the necessary machinery of instruction, and a fierce protection of the one thing that machinery cannot produce — a reader alone with a book, undergoing something that will never appear on any transcript.