Why women find bookworms sexy

A FAMOUS quote attributed to John Waters warns would-be lovers, "If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't f--k 'em."

hugh jackman

A FAMOUS quote attributed to John Waters warns would-be lovers, "If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't f--k 'em."

Based on the wisdom of Waters, reading books can help get you laid. That’s not the best reason to read them, hard as that might be for teenage boys to believe.

Sure, it’s one reason, and if you need that extra incentive, by all means use it if it’ll get you to stick your nose in a book. But you’d be better off brushing up on your Shakespeare for a plethora of other reasons that extend well beyond the inside of your pants.

In a perfect world, you would read voraciously - in your free time, for pleasure, while waiting for the train, while standing in line at the grocery store. You should read because it is one of the very few leisure pursuits that can actually make you a better person.

You don’t have to have read the “great books” that make up the Western canon, but it sure wouldn’t hurt. And given how often pop culture references the important books of the past 150 years, you’ll probably be much less confused if you do.

Becoming well-read requires that you read, and reading makes you smarter. Plenty of my pals wouldn’t read a book if you paid them. They’re enjoyable, clever men to chum around with, but none of them are the kind of sharp that makes you think they could pull off a bank robbery.

My anecdotal evidence tells me that you can bump into a group of people and figure out within a few minutes which of them picks up a paperback before bed. The smartest guy I know carries a copy of The Great Gatsby with him and leafs through it before every important meeting. He says it gets him in the rhythm of genius, and I believe him.

Reading forces you to sit and focus. It also improves your vocabulary, and doing it regularly even improves your analytical abilities. That means the guy with his nose in a novel on the train thinks quicker on his feet than the guy wearing earbuds and tapping out the newest Lil Wayne song on the window glass. The studies have been done, but you should be able to file them under “no duh.” Yes, reading is good for you.

Almost everything anyone is ever talking about stems from a book, or an idea that was rooted in one. Every episode of The Simpsons and Sopranos, every news story, and even every football game on a Friday night is brought back to and contextualised by the characters, plots and motivations that have been written down over the past 3000 years.

Our culture isn’t much more than a series of winks and nudges referring to what our storytellers have read, written and tweaked. The reward comes from having read through the same lines that someone else has and recognising in their words a path that you’ve already tread. It becomes your own because your take on the story is guaranteed to be individual, making your experience all the richer and all the more personal to you.

This one might be a tough sell to the guys who haven’t picked up a novel since high school. You’ve heard those dips--ts in the back of the movie theatre flapping their gums about how “the book was way better.” They may sound pretentious, but they also may have a point. Nine times out of 10, the book is better than the movie, because the person who read it was able to relate to it or understand it in a way that was personal to them.

On top of that, books never have to worry about special effects budgets or if a sex scene is going to earn an R rating or about compromising anything to anyone. Books are a direct link between the artist’s creative talent and the audience, and there’s a book that touches on every subject you could ever be interested in, but that’s not even the kicker.

The best thing about a book is that it tells you half the story and forces you to come up with all the scenery and information yourself, in a way that TV and video games can’t. Your mind in forced to fill in the blanks automatically, and the product is better than what anybody could ever spoon-feed you from a screen.

That brings me to my most important point: reading about something is as close as you can get to actually being there without actually being there. A contrarian might suggest he’d rather have adventures than read about them, and that sticking your nose in a book is no substitute for getting your hands dirty.

It’s a fair point, but some of us are saddled with responsibilities that keep us from sailing the Indian Ocean with a disgraced young lord looking for redemption, or walking the Parisian underworld between the wars, looking for women and enough money to pay for them, or fighting a totalitarian government by bedding that dark-haired gal from accounting (on second thought, that one shouldn’t be so hard).

The point is, when you’ve read a novel, you’ve lived through the story. You might not have murdered your pawn broker, but you’ve tagged along through the whole messy business. By the time the books start piling up around you, you’ve been a bank robber, a soldier, a member of the nouveaux riches and a beat cop.

You’ve lived through all kinds of situations and visited all kinds of places, at least on some level, because your brain has gone through the motions of experience and built up some muscle memory. You’ve picked up street smarts from your book smarts, and you’ve done it for the price of a few coffees.

To put it bluntly, be well-read because it’s to your strong advantage to be so. Put in the work, and let your mind do the running. Reading is almost an act of sedition in our passive digital-screen culture. It’s an engaging enterprise, and it’s the way our ancestors meant to pass on their collected experience.

Reading takes the time and focus a screen will never ask of you, rewarding you with intellectual riches if you take the time to curl up and focus. If life is a game of inches, and you’ve got a few hundred important books under your belt, you’ve got a leg up on anyone who hasn’t.

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