Reading as an act of resistance

To see your many answers to the question “What do you read this summer?” », We rejoice in front of so much enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Reading is obviously one of your vacation projects.

Posted at 7:00 a.m.

Talking about her readings. In addition, presenting her most recent favorites, exchanging the names of our favorite authors: this is one of the great pleasures of summer … However, and life, too.

Reading is not only to be distracted. In addition, It is traveling, opening, understanding, cultivating our humanity. However, And there are no “good” or “bad” books to do it.

Read your summer readings reading act resistance

We have long opposed “serious” readings and “light” readings. Furthermore, Summer, in particular, was reserved for “candy books” – thrillers, comics, chicklit. In addition, As if the pleasure was poorly perceived. Meanwhile, As if reading a good book should be a little suffering.

Fortunately, this Snob hierarchy tends to disappear. Meanwhile, You should never feel guilty someone guilty. Nevertheless, To each his book. Meanwhile, Even a romance or a station novel can just touch. What matters is that a book finds its reader.

Books take us where our lives do not always go, sometimes confronting us with very different realities of ours.

Fiction often makes it possible to better say what the test does not manage to pass. Through the fiction filter. it may be easier to tackle themes reading act resistance such as sexual violence, racism, homophobia or the rights of natives, for example.

Let us only think of the novels of Michel Jean. Naomi Fontaine which did more to raise awareness among Quebecers about indigenous realities than many official trials or speeches on the issue.

Through the words and the sensitivity of others, we manage to put ourselves in their shoes. We develop his empathy. And at the moment, this possibility of listening to the other has never been so precious.

Strangely, empathy is attacked by a certain right these days, which sees it as weakness. Elon Musk. for example, speaks of “suicidal empathy”, a term borrowed from Gad Saad, professor at Concordia University, whose next book, Suicidal Empathywill defend the idea that excess of empathy prevents making rational decisions.

Musk thus relays an idea that has become trendy in certain conservative circles. or that it should be wary of feeling too much. May our empathy weaken us. We think we dream …

I admit, I find this wacky thesis. There will never be too much empathy in the world, as there will never be too much love or solidarity. These values do not weaken us, they raise us. They deserve to be defended, not ridiculed.

And it is for this reason that reading must be celebrated. because it allows us to better understand the reality of our neighbor, even the most intimate.

I recently experienced it by reading the words of my ex-colleague Agnès Gruda. In his novel When, when, still?, Agnès tells the story of four families forced to leave Poland for security reading act resistance reasons. These families will scatter to the four corners of the world. where they will have to build a new life, with the challenges of adaptation that this implies. Through the characters of Ewa. Maja, exiled in Quebec, Agnès makes us live the emotions of people who, like her, have known exile.

Through the life of her characters. Agnès allowed me to understand the interior heartbreak of those who leave their country for a better life, but who will always carry the memories of the native country in them.

This is the power of reading.

And it is all the more precious as the empathy felt when you read. a book opens the way to compassion. However, compassion is a feeling that mobilizes, which leads to an action. Which allows to weave links. To build reading act resistance stronger communities.

Will someone dare to say that there is too much compassion in the world? Or that compassion threatens our civilizations?

Of course, not all books cause this little miracle. Some leave us indifferent. But the more we read, the more we increase our chances of being touched in the heart.

Maybe we say that we read to pass the time. To win during the holidays.

But in truth, we read to hang on. To understand each other, recognize yourself, get closer. We read to live better.

Reading is not only a summer hobby.

It is a life project.

What do you think? Take part in the dialogue