You Become What You Read

We’ve all heard, “You are what you eat,” the principle being that your diet determines what you become. The same holds true for your reading intake. Like the plate, the page shapes us. If you imagine each book like a meal and each article a light snack, what you consume and digest day in and day out, over years and decades, molds your character. So, how do reading habits sculpt you into a particular kind of person?

Whom You Hang With

First, we must realize that though we often read by ourselves, we never read alone. When you open up a book, you sit down with an author. The book is fundamentally a technology of conversation; it fosters the meeting of minds across time and space. The written word captures something of the author and, when read, conjures him. “All writers, by the way they use language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. . . . All writing is communication . . . it is the Self escaping into the open” (The Elements of Style, 97–98). In short, when you read, you hang out with an author.

This insight enables us to bring to bear the pervasive biblical principle that you become whom you hang out with. Your companions stamp their imprint on you. Habitually hanging with bad company will sand away the contours of good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33). On the other hand, when holy ones congregate, their love and good works spread like a good contagion (Hebrews 10:24–25).

Proverbs may have the most to say about the transformative power of companions. Befriend a wise man and end up wise; loiter around fools and you will contract folly (Proverbs 13:20). And Jesus says that everyone who follows a teacher — that is, watches his way of life and receives his words — will become like him for good or evil (Luke 6:40). This is the essence of reading. As Mortimer Adler explains, “Reading is learning from an absent teacher” (How to Read a Book, 16).

So, if our companions and teachers shape us, and if in every book an author offers us such company, is it any wonder books hold the magic that can make or break us, that can mold us into a Eustace or a Lewis? Yet we still have not said how this enchantment works. How do we become what we read? The books we read have a twofold effect: They train our desires and frame the way we perceive reality.

Books Condition Desires

“The diet of books we consume and the companionship of their authors change the way we see the world.” Books put pressure on our desires. They can teach us to want well or to want poorly, but none is neutral. Like living companions, authors act as mediators of desire; unlike them, they wield the particularly potent magic of the written word, inviting us to enter into their experiences, to participate in their worlds, to live with their characters, and to test-drive their worldviews. Books make the man because books catechize desires.

Books Frame Reality

The stories we embrace define us. Narrative scholars commonly assert that the stories we choose to read define who we are, but we also become the products of the stories we read. Stories reflect individual identity and have the power to modify it. This is also true for societies and nations. Stories form a chief means through which groups codify, preserve, and pass on their beliefs and values. (Recovering the Lost Art of Reading, 71)

Books put us face to face with authors. And every author presupposes things about man, the world, and God before the pen ever touches the page. Never neutral, they “do more than present human experiences; they interpret them” (Recovering the Lost Art, 59). Over time, the diet of books we consume and the companionship of their authors change the way we see the world. They can shrink our vision to almost nothing or expand it immeasurably. They can warp or straighten, drain or fill, color or desaturate.

Books provide the habitual furniture of the mind. They frame reality.

Befriend Good Books

How do books shape us? They shape us by putting us in close proximity to their authors — men and women who make certain things desirable, who see the world in a particular way, who are never neutral. In the pages of their books, we sit with them and eat from their table. We dwell with them. Alan Jacobs summarizes the effect well: “To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices” (How to Think, 63).

So, my friend, be careful what you read. Don’t malnourish your imagination. Don’t glut your passions. Attend to your diet. Single meals are not as important as habitual trends. A Twinkie (that fitness post on Instagram, that rant on Facebook, that thriller novel) is fine every once in a while; it might kill you if that’s all you eat. What to read comes down to maturity, discernment, and wise counsel. Your choice of companions is a matter of life and death (Proverbs 12:26). So choose wisely. Befriend good books.

This abbreviated article is by Clinton Manley is an editor for Desiring God and an adjunct instructor for Bethlehem College and Seminary. He and his wife, Mackenzie, have three children and live in Saint Paul.