The Wonderful World of Reading

Life and How to Live It Podcast with Dr. Rocco Episode: Reading for Pleasure — One of Life's Greatest Gifts

In this episode, I'm diving deep into one of my all-time favorite topics: reading for pleasure. I consider reading to be one of life's truly great pleasures, and whether you're a devoted bookworm or someone who hasn't picked one up in years, I genuinely believe there's something in this episode for you. I walk through my personal reading journey, explore the many gifts that reading gives us, and share a curated list of book recommendations spanning fiction and nonfiction.

My Reading Journey

I've loved reading since I was a young boy — books, magazines, comic books, even the back of the cereal box at breakfast. I was a sponge, and I've pretty much stayed that way my whole life. I was that odd high school kid who actually enjoyed the assigned reading in English class, and when I went on to study pre-med at the University of Virginia, I was fortunate to take some truly memorable English and History courses. In particular, a class on William Faulkner and Southern Gothic literature, and another on the plays of Shakespeare, taught me something I never forgot: there is incredible pleasure to be found in reading something that is genuinely challenging. Shakespeare's language can feel like a barrier, but once you get comfortable with it, the language is the thing — that's where the joy lives.

After college, medical school and residency consumed most of my reading time with textbooks and journal articles. But as my career progressed, I picked it back up. The real turning point came during a visit to my parents. I'd forgotten to bring anything to read, so I browsed the bookshelf in my old bedroom and pulled out The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway — a book I'd read at 16. Reading it again at around 35, I was stunned. As a teenager, I saw a group of friends drinking in Paris and going to bullfights in Spain. As an adult, I understood the profound loneliness and woundedness of Jake Barnes — a man left impotent by a war injury, in love with Lady Brett Ashley, unable to ever consummate that love. I saw the Lost Generation, the searching for meaning, the diversion and the despair. I had not gotten any of that at 16.

That experience changed everything. I asked myself: what else did I miss? And so I made a decision to read the classics — all of them. If I hadn't read it, I read it. If I had already read it, I reread it.

Highlights from the Classics

• The Epic of Gilgamesh – Written approximately 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, this is the story of King Gilgamesh, his friendship with Enkidu, and his desperate quest to find a cure for death after losing his beloved companion. What struck me most was the visceral realization that we as human beings have not changed very much. The things that caused Gilgamesh grief and anxiety are the very same things that haunt us today.
• The Iliad – One of my favorite books of all time. There is a scene where Andromache pleads with her husband Hector not to go to the front of the next day's battle, knowing he will die and that she has already lost her entire family to this war. I literally teared up reading it. This could have been a modern wife speaking to her husband before he leaves for combat. The universality of the human soul leaps off every page.
• The ancient Greek philosophers and the Bible – Taken together, these form the very roots of Western civilization and the way we think today.
• The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione – Written in 16th century Italy, this book outlines the qualities of the ideal gentleman: well-read, athletic, humorous, able to dance and dress well. Reading it, I felt like I was reading about James Bond. What fascinated me was seeing just how old these ideas really are.
• Don Quixote by Cervantes – Written in the early 1600s, around the same time as Shakespeare, this hilarious buddy story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is widely considered the first novel ever written.
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville – A deep dive into the whaling industry, yes, but more importantly a profound study of obsession and how hubris can bring tragedy crashing down on everyone around you.
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – An incredible story centered on revenge — that powerful, dangerous desire to get back at those who have wronged you.
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – Nearly 1,200 pages and close to 600 characters. A slog at times, but an extraordinary cognitive and emotional experience. The characters became more alive to me than many people I know in real life, and I still think about them regularly, years after finishing it.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez – The masterpiece of magical realism. Set in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, this novel weaves a dream. While you're in it, you are in a dream-like state. Truly an extraordinary reading experience.

What Does Reading Give Us?

• Pleasure – Sometimes it takes 20, 50, even 100 pages to sync up with an author's voice and way of thinking. Push through that initial barrier — the pleasure is waiting on the other side.
• Anticipation – Once you're hooked, you think about the book during the day, and you feel that little flutter of excitement when you pass it on your bedside table.
• Escapism – Whether it's sci-fi, fantasy, or a novel set in a completely different culture, reading transports us out of ourselves and into another world entirely.
• Knowledge – Nonfiction is built for learning, but great fiction authors like Umberto Eco pack their novels with rich history and cultural insight too.
• Vocabulary – Your vocabulary will genuinely grow, especially if you read the classics.
• Cognitive exercise – Keeping track of characters, storylines, and timelines is a real workout for the brain.
• Empathy – Fiction places you inside the heart, mind, and soul of another person in a way that real life simply cannot. I truly believe that being a reader of fiction made me a better doctor — it helped me understand what makes people tick.
• An expanded worldview – You learn about different places, cultures, and human experiences, and that makes you a better citizen of this country and of the world.

Nonfiction as Your Own Curriculum

I love nonfiction for the freedom it gives you to build your own learning path. Say you get curious about life for women in the Old West — you don't have to wait for a documentary. Just start reading. And the bibliography at the back of any good nonfiction book will send you down rabbit holes you never expected.

My Book Recommendations

Novels:

• Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry (1985) — Two friends lead a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. The characters are unforgettable. My wife considers this one of her all-time favorites too.
• This Is Happiness – Niall Williams (2019) — The story of the last town in Ireland to get electricity in the 1950s. Endearing, beautiful, and deeply touching.
• A Soldier of the Great War – Mark Helprin (1991) — One of my all-time favorites. An Italian soldier reflects on his life and his time in World War I. It's about love, loss, war, meaning, and the afterlife. Absolutely stunning.
• Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (1977) — A journey from North to South as Milkman Dead searches for his family's history. Themes of slavery, family secrets, and identity. Incredibly beautiful.

Short Stories:

• Table for Two – Amor Towles (2024) — My favorite recent short story collection. Fun, surprising, and completely engaging.
• The Pacific – Mark Helprin (2004) — Another excellent collection from one of my favorite writers.
• Flannery O'Connor — Pick up any of her collections. You're in for a wonderful time.
• Anton Chekhov — One of the great masters of the European short story.

A note on short stories: If you don't read much fiction, short stories are the perfect entry point. You can read one in a single evening, and reading before bed — rather than scrolling on your phone — is a great way to calm your nervous system and sleep better.

Nonfiction:

• The Power Broker – Robert Caro (1974) — A biography of Robert Moses and essential reading for understanding how New York City became what it is today. I listened to this on audiobook and got everything I needed from it.
• The Wide Wide Sea – Hampton Sides (2025) — The story of Captain Cook's third voyage: discovering Hawaii, returning to Tahiti, searching for the Northwest Passage. Written like a novel but completely true.
• Brunelleschi's Dome – Ross King — The story of how the great dome of Florence's cathedral was built in the 1400s, full of artistic rivalry and architectural genius. Fascinating.

One More Thing

Based on recent data, the top countries for reading by per capita books read per year are the United States, India, and the United Kingdom, with China, Italy, and France also ranking highly. Within the US, the top reading states are Vermont, New Hampshir

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Do you sometimes feel like life is passing you by? How would you like to get more out of life? We explore all things life on this podcast. Welcome to Life and How to Live It Podcast with Dr. Rocco. Welcome to another episode of the Life and How to Live It podcast with me, Dr. Rocco. Today's episode is about reading. Reading for pleasure. And I consider reading to be one of life's great pleasures. Now I understand that not everybody is a reader. If you are a reader, you will love this episode. If you're not a reader, I think you'll love this episode too. We're going to be talking about my personal reading journey. We're going to be talking about what reading can do for us, like the gifts and lessons that we get from reading. And I'm also going to recommend some books. Now, remember, this is an episode about pleasure reading. So I'm not talking about technical reading or what you have to read for your work. This is about what you choose to read because you want to. We're going to talk about fiction and nonfiction, although there will be a little emphasis more on fiction. And before we get started, I do want to mention this ongoing debate about audiobooks and whether audiobooks really count as reading. I will say, for me personally, I listen to audiobooks all the time. I tend to listen to nonfiction when I'm in my car taking a long trip. And I find it a completely appropriate way to get that information that I'm interested in in a particular nonfiction book. I do think there are some differences in what happens when we read a book versus listen to an audiobook. But I think ultimately the most important thing is that we get engaged in the story that is being told. So I'm not going to make a big uh distinction between uh audio versus reading. Now, I have always loved reading from the point when I was a young boy and I first learned to read. I could not get enough of it. You know, I was just, I would read books and magazines, comic books. I would sit at the breakfast table and read the back of the cereal box. I was a sponge. I wanted to immerse myself in all these stories and learn so much about the world. And I have pretty much stayed that way through my whole life. Now, when I was that odd high school kid who really liked the reading assignments we got in English class, and I went off to college at the University of Virginia and was pre-med. So most of my reading and my course load during college was in the sciences. But the University of Virginia has really world-renowned English and history departments, and I did take some classes there that are quite memorable and were very important to me in my uh reading journey. Uh, I remember a class in the literature of William Faulkner and the Southern Gothic uh novels, uh, and also a class in uh William Shakespeare, the plays of William Shakespeare. In those classes, I learned really for the first time about the pleasures of reading something that is challenging. You know, most of the time we want to read stuff that's easy. That's that just we sit down and we read it. But these challenging books, you know, you put a little more effort into it, but they give you back so much. And that's what I learned from those two classes in particular. Now, Shakespeare, you know, there is a huge barrier to entry for many people today of Shakespeare, which is the language, you know, the language is not something we're used to, but once we get comfortable with it, the language is the thing. As Shakespeare said, the play is the thing. Well, the language is the thing. It is the joy of reading the way this man wrote that can that just gives us this pleasure, the characters he created, the stories he came up with. It is an incredible thing. And if we just get intimidated by the language, we'll miss out on a world of reading pleasure. Now, after um college, I went to medical school and then off to residency training. And most of my reading at that point was really consumed with medical textbooks and uh journal articles, etc. So I didn't read as much for pleasure back in those days, but as my career went on, I started picking it up again, and I mostly read um popular fiction or maybe a popular nonfiction, things that are relatively common on the bestseller list, that kind of thing. Uh, but then I had a pivotal experience. I went to visit my parents, and usually when I travel, I would always bring something with me to read, even if it was a magazine. But this particular time I had not brought anything to read, and I looked in my old bedroom, and as parents tend to do, my bedroom was kind of left as it was when I went off to college, and there was a bookshelf in there with books that I had read in high school. So I looked through that bookshelf and I saw The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. And I said, I remember, I remember liking that book. It was about a group of friends who were living in Paris after World War I, and and they used to hang out at cafes and drink a lot and have fun, and then they went to Spain and went to bullfights. So I said, All right, I'll I'll read this book. And I read that book and I said, Oh my goodness, I did not get what this book was about when I was 16. And I was probably about 35 when I read reread that book. Yes, it was about a group of friends who lived in Paris after World War I, and they did hang out in cafes and they did drink a lot, they did go to bullfights in Spain, but really what the book was about was the main character, Jake Barnes, who had had a wound during the war that left him impotent. So he was unable to have sexual intercourse for the rest of his life, and this left him as a person who felt very isolated and lonely, and he had this great love of his life, uh, I guess we could call it, and her name was Lady Brett Ashley, and she also loved him back, and there was a ton of sexual tension in this book between these characters who could never consummate their relationship. And because they could not, they were trying to find meaning and diversion in so many other things that were around them, like partying and going to bullfights and things like that. So Jake represented that lost generation and the woundedness that they felt and how they would never regain what they had before the war. So I never got that when I was 16, but I got it when I was 35 because I had a lot more life experience. And at that point, I said to myself, okay, what else did I not get back then when I read these books? So I made the decision to read the classics, to read them all. I found myself a list of all the classic books, and and if I had never read it, I read it. And if I had already read it, I reread it because of what I learned from rereading The Sun Also Rises. And I'm just gonna go through a little bit about that. There are so many books on the list, but I'm just I've just chosen a few to highlight. The first one I started with was The Epic of Gilgamesh. So that's really, you know, chronologically the first first major classic book written about 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, which is you know Iraq today. And it is the story of King Gilgamesh, a young man, and his adventures with his friend Enkidu. Now, Enkidu at the beginning of the story is living as a kind of a wild man out in the wilderness, surrounded by the animals, at peace with with it all. Uh, but he he leaves it all for the love of a woman, and he goes to live in the city and becomes a great friend of Gilgamesh's, and they have many adventures together. And then one day Ankidu dies, and Gilgamesh is crushed. He sits at Ankidu's bedside for days waiting for him to come back to life or to wake up and he does not. And at that moment, Gilgamesh has the realization that his friend is never coming back, and that he also will die one day. And this was too much for him to bear. And so he goes on a quest trying to find the cure to death. Of course, it is a hopeless quest. And what I got from that book, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, was this very visceral realization that we as humans have not changed very much. This story was written 4,000 years ago in a place very far away, in a culture so different from our modern culture. Yet the things that were important to Gilgamesh, the things that caused him sadness and anxiety, are the same things that haunt us today. So then I went and read The Iliad. I could talk for days and days about the Iliad. It is one of my favorite books, but I will just bring up one scene that really, really struck me. So the Iliad is about the bat the Battle of Troy or the War, the Trojan War. And the night before a major battle, Hector, who is the uh the leader of the Trojan army, uh, his wife approaches him, and her name is an Andromeda. And Andromaca pleads with him. She says, Do not go to the front of this battle tomorrow, because I know you will die. I have lost my entire family in this war, and now I fear that I will lose my husband as well, and that my son will lose his father. And and I was reading this and literally teared up. I mean, the emotion, the raw emotion of this, and the um and just how present it is. This could have been a modern wife talking to her husband before he leaves for battle. And so once again, I learned about this universality of the human soul. And then I read the uh ancient Greek philosophers and the Bible. And if you take those two together, you have really the roots of our Western civilization, our way of thinking, and what has molded us into being the people that we are in this culture today. Then going into the 1500s, I'm skipping so far ahead, but in the 1500s, the Book of the Courtier, written by Baldassare Castiglione in Urbino, Italy, and this is a book in which he discusses the uh the characteristics and qualities of the perfect gentleman. And what's interesting about this particular book is that these ideas are still with us today. The perfect gentleman should be well read, he should be athletic, he should have a sense of humor, he should know how to dance and how to dress well, etc. etc. I felt like I was learning about James Bond, for instance, you know, because the perfect gentleman had to be really good at martial arts as well, according to this book. And so what was interesting in that book was this idea of how these ideas have been with us for so long, and looking back at kind of where they started. And then there's Don Quixote. Don Quixote was written in the early 1600s, around the same time that Shakespeare was writing, written by Cervantes in Spain, and it is the story of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, and the adventures that they go on. And the book is hilarious, it is so funny. It's a buddy story in which these two guys go off and have these adventures and misadventures, and it is considered to be the first novel ever written. Skipping ahead, there's Moby Dick by um Herman Melville. This book was written in the mid-1800s, and it was about the whaling industry. Uh, it is a novel, but it had so much information in it. I learned so much about the whaling uh industry, how how it happened, how they hunted the whales, how they processed the whales once they were once they were killed. But the important part of the novel is this obsession that Captain Ahab has. And so once again, we're getting into that soul of man, this how obsession and hubris can bring uh total tragedy on the main character and everyone around him. If we talk about obsession, one obsession is revenge. Revenge is the key emotion or desire in the book The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Uh, an incredible story, just one of the classic stories, but it's the revenge and that feeling of wanting to get back at the people who have wronged you. And then jumping ahead to the end of the 1800s, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, a super long, long read, a slog, a door, a door um stopper for for some people, 1200 pages or so, with almost 600 characters. The main characters have multiple names. So this reading, reading this book was an incredible pleasure. It was a challenge, it was a cognitive exercise to keep everybody straight. Uh, but once I got to know the characters well, they became more alive than people that I know in my real life. And I think of them at least once a month. And I read this book probably 10 to 15 years ago. And then last on this and shortened list is 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is the masterpiece of magical realism written in the mid-20th century by a Colombian author about the little town of Makondo in Colombia. This novel weaves a dream, and when you're in it, you're in a dreamlike state. It is an incredible experience. So, this is just a very shortened version of my reading journey. And I will jump ahead in a bit and talk about what I kind of what you get out of reading these books. But before that, I'm gonna look at nonfiction for a second. Nonfiction for pleasure. I think we all read nonfiction in some way. We may read articles uh online, the newspaper, technical manuals for our jobs, things like that. I'm talking about reading nonfiction for pleasure. Just because you're interested in learning more about something. You can learn so much by reading nonfiction about people, places, and events that you want to know about. You can create your own curriculum. You know, say you want to know about the old West. Well, you can study the Old West, pick some books. Maybe you start getting interested in the life of women in the in the old West. What was what was that like? You could wait for someone to make a documentary about that, or you could just start reading. When you get a nonfiction book about a topic, there will usually be a bibliography or notes at the end of the book that can give you all kinds of ideas of other books to read on the subject. And you, dear reader, have this ability to go down any rabbit hole you want to and go looking for stuff that's just interesting for the sheer joy of learning. Now, what does reading do for us? What does it give us? Why even do it? Reading for pleasure. Well, it gives you pleasure. Sometimes the pleasure takes a while to get to, and I want to just say a word about that. I have read a lot of books, as I've said, and I still have trouble getting into a book when I pick up a new book, because what we are doing as readers is kind of melding our brain, our mind, with the brain of the writer. And every writer has a different brain, just as every human has a different brain. And so sometimes it takes 20 pages, 50 pages, 100 pages to get in sync with that person's mind, with their way of writing. But once you do, it becomes quite easy. So this may be a barrier that some people need to overcome to get to the pleasure. Uh, I just want to say, I have that barrier and I've read quite a bit. Now, there's also anticipation. You know, once you get into a story, whether it be a nonfiction or a fiction story, you want to get back to it. You think about it while you're at work. Or maybe you walk by that book that's sitting on your bedside table and you have that little that little flurry of anticipation, like, oh, I I wonder what happens next. We get escapism. You know, escapism is a wonderful thing, you know. Uh going out of yourself and into another world. We can escape into anything with reading, into the into the world of another planet far away with sci-fi, or the medieval kinds of environments that are in most fantasy books, or maybe something about a totally different culture, like you read a book about uh that is set in China or Japan or Africa. Um, we can escape into those places, and it is a wonderful thing. We gain knowledge, we learn about a lot. You learn, of course, with nonfiction, that's really what it's for. But in fiction, you can learn a lot too. You learn about many some authors write a lot of information in their novels. One of those people was Umberto Echo, who I really enjoyed reading. And I learned so much about history and culture and what people thought in different times in the past. So you gain knowledge, you gain vocabulary. Your vocabulary will be improved if you read, especially if you read the classics. We gain cognitive exercise, you know. We have to keep track of all these characters and what they're doing, what happened before, etc., etc. We gain empathy. You know, this is something that people talk about a lot: the empathy that you get from reading. When you read, especially fiction, it puts you inside the heart, the mind, the soul of another person. This is something that we cannot do in our normal lives. We can know people, we can try to know them, but we can never really get inside of them the way we can with characters in a in a fiction book. And what that does for you is it it gives you a gateway to understand. I think that being a reader, especially a reader of fiction, made me a better doctor. It made me understand what made people tick better. And so I think that is a gift that we have at our fingertips if we we would just read. And also reading enlarges your worldview. As I said before, you know, you can escape into all these different places where you could learn about different places and different people, different people's struggles and experiences. And that enlarges our worldview, makes us better citizens of this country and citizens of the world. So now I'd like to recommend a few books. Instead of having a Dr. Rocco's Rex today, these will be the Rex. I've broken it down into fiction and nonfiction and in fiction novels. I'm not going to say a lot about each one of these books, but Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, 1985. This is an incredible story about two friends who have a group of also other colleagues, we'll call them, who take a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. And so there is this cattle drive and the experiences along the way, but the characters are incredible. Now, this sounds like a book that maybe is for for men, only for men. It is for men, but my wife finds this to be one of her very favorite books ever. There are a couple of female characters that are so well written and so well portrayed. And then there's the friendship between the two main characters, which is absolutely priceless. Highly recommended. Then there is the book This Is Happiness by Niall Williams, written in 2019. This is the story of, it's a novel, and it is the story of the last town in Ireland to get electricity in the 1950s. And it is just the most endearing, beautiful, touching story of the people who live in that town. A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, 1991. This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is quite a long book, just a heads up. But uh it is the story of an Italian soldier during World War One. It begins as him as an old man and he meets a young man and he begins to tell his story of really his whole life, but mostly focused on his time during World War One. It's a it's a book about love, it's about loss, it's about war, it's about meaning, it's about the afterlife, it's about so many things. And then the last of my novels to recommend is The Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison, written in 1977. This is an incredible novel that the main character, Make'em Make Em Dead, or The Milkman, who is an African American living in Michigan, who is trying to understand his family history and takes really a journey from the north to the south, and there are themes of uh slavery and family and secrets, family secrets. It is incredibly beautiful. What a what a great book. Short stories, very quickly. The A Table for Two by Amor Tolls, uh written in 2024. This is my favorite book of short stories that I've read recently. Uh the stories are are just fun and really interesting. The Pacific by Mark Helprin, written in 2004, another Mark Helprin uh recommendation, a number of really interesting stories and very entertaining. Of course, uh one of the great short story writers of the 20th century, Flannery O'Connor, pick up any of her short story collections and you are in for some a wonderful time. Short stories may be the perfect way to get into reading if you don't read a lot of fiction, because they're short. It's not a big investment. You can read a short story usually in one evening. Speaking of reading in the evening, that's a recommendation. In order to sleep better, it might be helpful to read before you go to bed because that helps to calm your nervous system down. Instead of doing stuff like scrolling on Instagram, read a short story. And then, of course, one of the masters of European short story writing is Anton Chekhov, uh, who wrote in the late 19th century. Switching over to nonfiction recommendations, I have The Power Broker by Robert Carrow, 1974. This is uh basically a biography of Robert Moses. Uh, I believe this is required reading for any New Yorker to really understand, you know, what went on before you were born uh that made New York City the city it is today, at least from a physical standpoint. An incredible story. Once again, a very long book. I listened to this on audiobook uh and I got everything I needed out of it. Um, The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides, written in 2025. This is the story of Captain Cook's third journey of discovery, an incredible story about uh traveling in the uh in the late uh 1700s, uh discovering Hawaii, going back to Tahiti, trying to find the Northwest Passage, the different civilizations that uh Captain Cook and his men came upon, an unbelievable story. So it's a story, it's written as a story, but it is nonfiction, so you're learning about real history. Uh, and then the last book that I will recommend is Brunelleschi's Dome, written by Ross King. This is the story of the building of the dome on the cathedral in Florence in the 1400s. An incredible story about the rivalry between artists, and there's a lot in there about architecture and building techniques, a fascinating, fascinating read. And now it's time for one more thing. Based on recent data, the top countries for reading, based on per capita number of books read per year, are the United States, India, and the United Kingdom. Also scoring pretty high are China, Italy, and France. Within the United States, the states that read the most are Vermont, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, which goes to show that those long, cold winter nights are perfect for curling up with a good book. Well, that's it for today's show. I hope you have enjoyed this journey into the world of reading. Until next time, so long. That's all for today's show. Thanks for listening to the Life and How to Live It podcast with Dr. Rocco. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe and leave a review. See my show notes to find out more about the show. And remember, life is not a dress rehearsal. Until next time.