Ideas from the book
This book does not argue a closed thesis; it offers a score for each person to perform their own version.
Reading as a human technology
Reading can be understood as one of the most powerful technologies ever created by human beings — something outside the natural order of things. First, language allowed our ancestors to cooperate, save energy and pass on knowledge; later, writing made it possible to preserve that knowledge beyond individual memory and carry it to other places and generations. The book shows how the spread of reading completed that transformation, because it allowed each person to reach, unaided, ideas and experiences created by other minds, and to return to them as often as they wished. Following Walter J. Ong’s ideas on the technologies of the word, Un laberinto propio gathers those contributions, and the findings of others, to explain that reading is not a “natural” capacity but a technology invented by human beings — one that has transformed the way we think, our capacity for introspection and the organisation of societies. The printing revolution of the fifteenth century progressively multiplied its effects and opened a process of accumulation and circulation of knowledge that leads all the way to the exponential revolution of the Internet and artificial intelligence, which is nothing but a consequence of the technologies of the word.
Humanity’s axial moments
In The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers gave the name “Axial Age” to the period between roughly 800 and 200 BC when, in different parts of the world and independently of one another, figures and traditions emerged — Confucius and Laozi in China, the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, the prophets of Israel and the Greek philosophers — that transformed the way we think about the human being, morality and the meaning of existence. Un laberinto propio adapts this idea to the present moment and suggests that we may now live through axial moments that are far briefer. In an era of exponential transformations, the book reads the pandemic as one such possible turning point, capable of accelerating in a few years technological, social and cultural changes that would once have taken many decades. The example also serves to defend one of the essay’s central ideas: reading also means appropriating the concepts we find in books and using them, in a personal way, as tools for interpreting a reality different from the one they were conceived for.
Reading as a tool for predicting the future
Can reading help us anticipate the future? Not because it turns the reader into a fortune-teller, but because it enables them to recognise signals, relate events and draw on experiences they have never lived through in person. Un laberinto propio starts from a suggestive connection between reading and divination — present even in the etymology that Ivan Illich explores in In the Vineyard of the Text — to defend a more concrete idea: the larger our repertoire of readings, the more models we have for interpreting what happens. Reading about the London plague of 1665 helped Luis González recognise certain signals during the first weeks of the 2020 pandemic; and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation cycle, read in adolescence, later shaped his professional interest in strategic planning and scenario analysis. Reading the future means, in this sense, learning to connect clues in the present with knowledge, experiences and patterns accumulated through books. Although reading cannot give us certainty about what will happen, it can train us to imagine possible futures and to be better prepared for them.
Reading as effort that yields pleasure
Reading demands effort. Unlike biological capacities such as seeing, walking or hearing, our brain was not born ready for reading: it must reorganise neural networks originally meant for other functions in order to learn to decipher words, build meanings, remember, anticipate and imagine. Un laberinto propio proposes, however, that this effort should not be understood as the price we pay for reading, but as part of reading’s very pleasure. Something similar happens with physical exercise, or with learning to love a music that is difficult at first, because repetition, knowledge and the progressive overcoming of challenges transform our experience. The book illustrates this with the process of learning to enjoy Richard Wagner’s operas: years of listening, of acquiring references and of coming to understand his musical language turned the initial effort into an ever-greater source of pleasure. Ambitious reading works in much the same way: the more we learn to interpret complex texts and the more knowledge we bring to them, the greater our chances of discovering connections, meanings and nuances.
Reading to understand others
One of literature’s most powerful faculties is that it lets us contemplate the world from a perspective other than our own. Un laberinto propio explores this idea through works such as Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, where the same events take on different meanings depending on the character through whose eyes we come to know them. The reader thus discovers that what we call reality depends, to a large extent, on who observes and interprets it. The book also records the power of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels to enrich a male reader’s view of women’s perspectives. Reading fiction thus becomes a training ground for our capacity to put ourselves in other people’s places. By temporarily inhabiting other lives, other eras, other cultures or even other ways of perceiving the world, we broaden our repertoire of experiences and our understanding of other people’s motivations. The book likewise cites several scientific studies that demonstrate the positive impact of reading literary fiction on the ability to accept different perspectives and on the development of empathy — and so it can help ease coexistence and strengthen the conditions needed for life in a democratic society.
Ambitious reading and analytical thinking
Reading demanding texts is not just a matter of understanding what they say: it forces us to relate ideas, interpret nuances, handle a wide vocabulary, weigh arguments and live with complexity. Un laberinto propio links these capacities to “analytical thinking” and to the idea of “higher-level reading” defended by Miha Kovač, Anne Mangen and André Schüller-Zwierlein in the Ljubljana Manifesto. Kovač argues that to understand novels, essays and other complex texts we need a lexical repertoire far larger than the one required to get by in everyday conversation, and that this richness of language also expands our capacity to think and argue about difficult questions. Ambitious reading can thus be understood as training for analysing information, distinguishing facts from opinions, facing uncertainty and avoiding over-simple explanations of a complex reality. Un laberinto propio carries this reflection into the territory of democracy: a society made up of people able to read, reason and submit their own ideas to revision will be better prepared to evaluate political proposals, recognise simplifications and take decisions in an environment saturated with information. Reading should not determine what we must think; it should strengthen the tools with which we can think for ourselves.
Reading and libraries as European assets
Libraries are much more than buildings where books are kept and lent: they can work as essential infrastructures of an open, educated, creative society. Un laberinto propio starts from the médiathèque of Saintes, in France, to observe a European model in which libraries, schools, public services and shared spaces belong to a single conception of life in community. A library can offer the serendipity of discovering a book that changes a life, ease the integration of those arriving from other countries, fight loneliness, or become a place of learning, creation and civic participation. But its strategic value comes from what remains at its centre: reading. A society with readers able to understand complex texts, relate different kinds of knowledge and develop thought of their own has better tools for creating, innovating and taking part in a democracy. That is why Un laberinto propio proposes regarding reading and libraries as European assets: they belong to a shared cultural tradition and they are resources for defending, in a world under intense technological and geopolitical competition, a model of society built on knowledge, creativity, education and freedom; because libraries are a public service that strengthens equity of access to reading.
Reading and economic complexity as wealth
What relationship could there be between books, economic complexity and the creation of wealth? Un laberinto propio approaches this question through the arrival of the first printing press in Spain, set up by Johannes Parix in Segovia in the fifteenth century. The author advances the hypothesis that it was not entirely by chance that this new technology found a home in a city with a significant textile industry and a technical tradition that required specialised workers, tools, diverse knowledge and trading networks. The episode serves to link reading to the concept of “economic complexity” developed by researchers such as César Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann: economies capable of combining a greater diversity of knowledge and productive activities tend to generate more complex products and show greater potential for prosperity. Reading can be woven into that process because it allows people to acquire knowledge, relate different kinds of expertise and pass them on between people and generations. Seen from this perspective, books, education and reading are not merely cultural goods: they form part of the capital of knowledge on which a complex, innovative, wealth-creating society can be built.
Reading for freedom and equality
Reading alone does not guarantee a free and egalitarian society, but it provides some of the tools with which to build one. Un laberinto propio argues that reading widens our knowledge of the world and of those who are different, strengthens our capacity to form our own judgement, and makes us more resistant to arbitrariness and to over-simple explanations. This idea takes concrete shape in the image of a city like Madrid, transformed by people from very different places who bring their accents, their music, their readings and their ways of understanding life. But freedom and equality also demand opportunities: access to education, books, bookshops and libraries can help ensure that the family or social circumstances we start from determine less of each person’s intellectual horizon. That is why reading is also a civic matter: a society in which more people possess the knowledge, the words and the references to interpret reality for themselves is better prepared for its citizens to aspire to be, truly, free and equal.
The pleasure of walking the labyrinth
Why can getting lost in a labyrinth be pleasurable? Un laberinto propio uses the act of walking along forking paths as a metaphor for reading and for the workings of the imagination. Against the itinerary that seeks to reach a destination as quickly and efficiently as possible, the labyrinth invites us to accept the detour, explore unexpected paths and enjoy discovery. Something similar happens when we read: one book leads to another book, an idea awakens a memory, and a sentence can strike an unforeseen connection with a city, a piece of music or a lived experience. From such encounters creativity is also born, understood as the capacity to establish new relationships between elements that had previously remained apart. To do so we need curiosity and a broad repertoire of knowledge, because we cannot connect what we do not know. The labyrinth thus stands for a way of reading, walking and thinking that does not fear digression: losing the path for a moment may be precisely the way to find something we were not looking for.
School as a cornerstone of a reading society
A good teacher can change a reader’s life. Un laberinto propio shows this through a memory of adolescence: a teacher walked into class one day, unexpectedly announced a dictation and began to read “The Circular Ruins”, by Jorge Luis Borges. He broke off before the ending and told his pupils that if they wanted to know how it finished, they would have to look for Ficciones in the library. That simple gesture turned Borges into a reading companion for the rest of the author’s life. The episode sums up one of the book’s theses: if we want to foster reading, school is decisive territory, and good teachers can awaken a curiosity that no institutional programme can impose. Reading, listening and writing also reinforce one another. The dictation forced the pupils to turn sounds into words, understand them and reproduce them slowly by hand, turning an apparently routine school exercise into an intense form of appropriating a text. School can teach the competences needed for reading, but its most ambitious mission is something else: to make sure a child discovers a book they will want to go on reading when no one is making them do it. Above all — as the author insists in various passages — school can remove a fundamental part of the inequalities with which children come to reading, offsetting the differences that stem from homes where books are more, or less, present.
Reading as a creative act
Every reading of a book is different, because every reader builds their own interpretation. Un laberinto propio therefore compares the act of reading to the interpretation of a musical score: the words are written down, just as musical notes are, but the work takes on a singular form when someone performs it. The idea arises from reading Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Music as Speech, and from a simple observation: the same Beethoven composition can sound very different depending on who conducts or performs it. Something similar happens with books. Each reader brings their own memories, knowledge, experiences and previous readings, draws different connections and imagines in their own way what the text proposes. Even the same person can read the same book years later and build a different interpretation, because they too have changed. Reading is, from this perspective, a creative act: the writer supplies the text, but it is the reader’s mind that turns it into a unique experience.