{"id":35302,"date":"2015-09-24T12:09:23","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T11:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=35302"},"modified":"2015-09-24T13:35:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T12:35:59","slug":"richard-smith-reading-for-a-long-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2015\/09\/24\/richard-smith-reading-for-a-long-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Smith: Reading for a long life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"richard_smith_2014\"<\/a>At 63 I\u2019m preparing for my capacities and faculties to fall away, and I think about what I hope to preserve. Taking being with those I love as a given, the most important things to me are in order: reading, writing, listening to music, walking, and looking at art. I also love theatre, food, wine, travel, and whisky (all the paraphernalia of a privileged, middle class, highly educated life), but these are of the second rank. So I hope that reading will be the last to go, and recently\u00a0I\u2019ve learnt (through reading) two new things: firstly, that my reading may prolong my life; and secondly, what makes a regular reader.<\/p>\n

The evidence that reading prolongs life comes from the Jerusalem Longitudinal Study of cognitively intact 70 year olds living in the community<\/a>. Some 337 people (148 women, 189 men) were followed over eight years, and 93 (83%) of the 112 men who read a book every day were still alive eight years later compared with 47 (61%) of those who didn\u2019t, a highly significant difference. There was no difference among the women, raising a question about the plausibility of a causal link. Reading books is, of course, associated with higher socioeconomic status and with all the goodies it brings, but after adjusting for socioeconomic status, smoking, physical activity, and several other possible confounders the men who read books still outlived those who didn\u2019t read.<\/p>\n

Looking at the Kaplan-Meier survival curve I do wonder about the men who don\u2019t read. They begin to fall away quickly, and I imagine them to be a sour, exhausted group for whom death holds great attractions. Perhaps the link with reading is an artefact.<\/p>\n

One of the weaknesses of the study is that it didn\u2019t ask what people were reading. With my literary snobbish tendencies, I like to think that those who are reading Henry James, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Flaubert are living longer than those reading modern potboilers, and I especially like to think that those reading Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare will live the longest of all.<\/p>\n

Of course, I don\u2019t really care. I\u2019m certainly not reading to prolong my life, and I put quality of life way ahead of quantity. But so long as I can keep reading, I feel it will be enough. Even, I like to think, if deaf, immobile, incontinent, and in pain, reading will be a reason to keep going. This does mean that dementia, following my mother and grandmother, will be particularly awful, although I hope I won\u2019t know (or will have bumped myself off first).<\/p>\n

I read in an essay, My Father\u2019s Brain<\/em>, by Jonathan Franzen how dementia is \u201ca prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its otherwise tightly conjoined parts\u2014death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of body.\u201d (Franzen in his turn read that in David Shenk\u2019s book The Forgetting<\/em>.) My reading could survive death of autonomy, but not death of memory.<\/p>\n

My second learning of the morning is about what makes a person a committed, lifelong reader of \u201csubstantive works of fiction.\u201d My learning comes from Franzen\u2019s famous \u201cHarper\u2019s Essay,\u201d in which, he described later tongue in cheek, how he considered it \u201capocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don\u2019t read much Henry James.\u201d<\/p>\n

Franzen learnt about the two things that make a committed lifelong reader of substantive fiction from Shirley Brice Heath, an American linguistic anthropologist. Firstly, such reading must have been \u201cheavily modelled\u201d when the person was very young. That applies to me and my two brothers: our mother read constantly, to herself and to us. \u201cThank you, mother. That was a great gift, equal even to the gift of love.\u201d Secondly, the child needs somebody with whom he or she can share the passion. I can\u2019t remember such a person, unless it was my mother or my brother.<\/p>\n

These findings bothered Franzen as neither of his parents read, but Heath explains that there\u2019s a second type of reader\u2014\u201cthe social isolate\u2014the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him.\u201d These readers move into an imaginary world, but can\u2019t share the world because it is imaginary. So their relationship is with the authors not others, and these kinds of readers are much more likely than the others to become writers.<\/p>\n

This fits Franzen exactly. \u201cYou are,\u201d said Heath, \u201ca socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.\u201d Franzen is exhilarated by this description: suddenly he knows why he wants to write. And it\u2019s nothing to do with living longer.<\/p>\n

Richard Smith<\/strong> was the editor of <\/em>The BMJ until 2004. He is now chair of the board of trustees of icddr,b [formerly International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh], and chair of the board of Patients Know Best. He is also a trustee of C3 Collaborating for Health.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At 63 I\u2019m preparing for my capacities and faculties to fall away, and I think about what I hope to preserve. Taking being with those I love as a given, the most important things to me are in order: reading, writing, listening to music, walking, and looking at art. I also love theatre, food, wine, […]<\/p>\n

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