Why do we read? Why do I read? What do I read?

Why do we read, why do I read, what do I read? That's what I'm going to look at, ponder, scribble about, try to figure out. Let's not limit it to reading, either. What do I watch, what do we watch, why do we watch it - on TV, film, video, dvd, blu-ray, anything. I have spent so much of my life reading and deeply absorbed in movies of all kinds, and also a good deal of my life writing, again of all kinds, and I'm going to take a little time off from all that writing, or perhaps better to say engage in a different kind of writing, to chronicle what I read and (sometimes) what I watch every day, to try to make sense of all this material that enters my consciousness and, let's face it, changes me. A smart teacher I once had (J. Hillis Miller), one of those professors who showed up about once a month for class, well tolerated by my college because of his eminence, but no matter, said it very well, in a phrase that has stayed with me for all these years. We read to gain the consciousness of the consciousness of another (an other?). Yes, that is at the basis of it. But there is more to it. Think how narrow the world would be, your world would be, if you had never read a novel (or seen a movie). Think of what you wouldn't know, of whom you wouldn't know. But then again - what do we "know" from having read a novel? Do we know 18th-century English country life from reading Jane Austen? Or do we think we know because we have read her novels? She is an author, and therefor our "authority" for a certain world view that we adopt, and assume is real. Maybe it's not. But it is our point of access.

Right now I am in the midst (literally, midpoint of each) of two novels, totally different in setting and scope: War and Peace, and Things Fall Apart. Can you imagine two such different "worlds" or more accurately world-views populating anyone's brain at the same time? But this happens all the time! What will happen when I finish those books? How will they cohabit in my mind? To what extent will they determine who I am?