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.

Eustace Clarence Scrubb almost deserved his name. At the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, readers quickly identify him as a fussy know-it-all who hates authority and suffers from an impoverished imagination. Midway through the story, Eustace finds himself transformed into a dragon as an outward symbol of his inner state. How does a boy end up like this, draconic inside and out, hating and hated by others? In part, Lewis says, because “Eustace had read none of the right books” (463).

Really? How does that work? Lewis knew (as all the wise do) that one of the most significant influences on character is what one reads:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend [i.e., a person with poor reading habits]. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. (An Experiment in Criticism, 140)

In other words, you are 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

At the beginning of The Inferno, Dante enters the circle of hell where adulterers suffer the consequences of their sins. Just as they were blown about by lustful passions in life, in death a hellish cyclone whirls and whips them about. During a brief lull in the storm, the pilgrim Dante meets Francesca and Paolo. They tell their story of “love,” an irresistible passion that seized them, tossed them into an adulterous bed, and ultimately led to their untimely deaths. Dante asks Francesca what caused them to indulge this “love.” It turns out their illicit affair was sparked by a book.

Francesca and Paolo steeped themselves in the literature of chivalry, which celebrates adultery.

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