Once our school days are behind us, many adults begin to treat reading as a luxury activity, an occasional hobby we might dip into during a week at the beach or in rare moments of leisure. Few Americans, it seems, give much thought to the subject of how to choose good books. Instead, we might idly select titles that grace the best-seller list or a friend’s bookshelf, if we make time to read regularly at all.

A Gallup survey from January 2022 found that Americans read an average of 12.6 books during the previous year, the lowest number Gallup has recorded since 1990. The poll found that adults in the U.S. read about two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016. More-educated Americans in particular reported reading less than in the past: In 2021, college graduates said they read an average of about six fewer books annually than was the case for their cohort between 2002 and 2016.

According to the survey — which, notably, allowed respondents to count books partially finished — the overall decline was mostly a function of a drop in how many books readers were reading, as opposed to a decline in the number of Americans who were reading at all.

While not illuminating as to the causes of this sharp decline, a new book seems to suggest that the disappearance of the American reader would not bode well for the long-term intellectual and spiritual health of our citizens or our country. In Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice, scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson makes the case that, if done well, reading can serve not only to enlighten the mind but also to invigorate the soul, shaping the one who reads into both a better thinker and a better person.

The book opens with a quiz of sorts, offering a way to reflect on how often we read and what books we’re attracted to, as well as on how and why we read when we choose to do so. The quiz has no right or wrong answers but is meant to guide the reader in better understanding himself, his inclinations, and his motivations as a reader, enabling him to adapt the author’s argument to his own experience.

Wilson writes from the perspective of an Anglican, and she argues in her introduction that, at its core, all of our reading ought to be considered preparatory, laying the groundwork for us to become better readers of the Word of God: “Why and how we read matters as much as what we read. If we are poor readers, an encounter with the Word will not do much to make us his people. . . . In reading other books, we practice reading the Bible; and in reading the Bible, we read other books by that lens.”

She certainly wouldn’t suggest that non-biblical reading is merely a training ground for encounters with the Bible, but she makes a compelling case that all reading is ultimately — and perhaps inherently — oriented toward God and rooted in our identity as his creatures. “God creates the world by word. . . . He converses with human beings in Genesis through words,” she writes. “When God enters creation in the incarnation, John describes him as the Word that ‘became flesh.’ . . . Human beings are word creatures, and Christians especially should be bookish creatures.”

The rest of the book is structured according to one of the author’s foundational points: “If we are to learn how to read well, I recommend we practice reading according to the ways of those readers we admire.” Each of the subsequent sections takes one of four thinkers as an exemplar: Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy L. Sayers. As a means to illuminate how we might bring a refreshed approach to the act and art of reading, Wilson examines how reading functioned in each of their lives.

While some of her claims come across as a bit sweeping and her tone can be dogmatic, Wilson’s argument merits close consideration. One of her central ideas is that reading well can improve one’s character — and that whether it actually does so depends far more on the disposition of the reader than on the material being read. “Bad people have read good books,” she writes. And: “Reading books will not save your soul. It will not transform a bad person into a good one.” In short, reading in itself isn’t the goal; learning to read well is what makes reading most worthwhile and transformative.

For those who already enjoy reading, the idea that our hobby, rightly ordered, can or even should be a means of self-improvement might be at once inspiring and daunting. In one sense, her argument is freeing. While she wouldn’t argue that just any book lends itself to good reading, she emphasizes that reading with care and thoughtfulness is often far more important than our choice of tome. In this view, even reading a book chosen chiefly for its entertainment value can be thought of as a good use of time.

In a lifetime of reading, I’ve experienced the truth of what Wilson writes. One of the most pleasant aspects of being homeschooled in grade school was the time left over in the day for free reading. My mom, brother, and I went to the public library at least one afternoon a week — a habit in which I persist to this day — and brought along enormous canvas bags, which we were allowed to fill to the brim. No one passed judgment on how many books we collected — unless, of course, we were unable to locate a book past its due date, something of a catastrophe when libraries still imposed stiff fines. Books made long road trips bearable, even enjoyable; the canvas bag would come with us, close to overflowing.

This love of reading did not necessarily shape me into a virtuous person — more of a lifelong journey than a destination, in any event — but it gave me the gift of a lively moral imagination, and I credit my love of writing in part to all those years buried in books. In college, it wasn’t until my senior year that I made time for free reading, alongside my heavy load of reading for classes. When I did, I could feel my mind broaden and shift; it made the rest of my intellectual work easier and more interesting.

I think this is what Wilson means when she argues that the way we approach the act of reading will, over time, shift our perspective on life. We would be mistaken to consider it merely a leisure activity. Reading well forms a habit of mind conducive to sustaining deeper thought, cultivating virtue and imagination, gaining insight into the world and human nature, and learning to see others as they are.

While Wilson argues that reading well can serve a variety of essential purposes, we would be wrong to interpret her case as a utilitarian one. Approaching books as a means to an end, even an end as worthy as character development or growth in knowledge, won’t make us good readers, or good people. Reading well seems to preclude choosing books simply because we feel we ought to read them or speed-reading in order to check a title off our list.

“How much better and wiser it would be, how much more instructive and enriching, if we proceeded at a snail’s pace!” Henry Miller says of reading in The Books in My Life. “What matter if it took a year, instead of a few days, to finish the book?” And how much better, still, if we proceed at that snail’s pace for a lifetime.