COME OUT AND PLAY? : I'd rather be reading.

Readers of the world unite. Oprah loves you. She runs a book club and when she recommends a book it skyrockets to the top of the best-seller list. Full disclosure. I have never actually seen Oprah on TV with my own eyes, but I believe that she exists-and influences our world.

When Oprah endorsed The Reader by Bernard Schlink (Random House) sales soared; Amazon.com lists it as seventeenth in sales and provides 241 reviews by readers. I had already read the hardcover version and felt surprised by Oprah's choice. Schlink writes well but his tale is so austere that I had hesitated to pass the book on to my friends. Granted the story starts out with a lot of sex and includes a dramatic courtroom trial, but the heroine (?) Hanna is an enigmatic former concentration camp guard who goes to prison for war crimes rather than admit her illiteracy. In prison Hanna learns to read, but on her release neither she nor the detached narrator lives happily ever after. No mass appeal here, I would have thought.

I fancy myself a discriminating judge of people's taste in books because of my long years in the book-giving business. I buy new novels with reckless abandon (no delay of gratification), and justify my habit by passing the volumes on to the friends and family members who will like them. This practice solves the space problem and removes the physical evidence of extravagance. Dare we hope that Oprah will succeed in making reading and buying books A-OK, an activity not confined to "eggheads," "nerds," or "wonks"? All of my life I have been mildly persecuted for avid reading. "Put down that book and come out to play," has been the constant admonishment. My Southern family put a high priority on having fun, so in our family of two girls and two parents I was dragooned into endless games, starting with parchesi and ending with bridge. "Isn't it too bad we didn't have another child" they joked, "so Sidney could read?"

In my heart I knew that I'd rather be reading because it was really truly the most fun of all. Like Proust I now understand that reading is a form of friendship, and has a special merit: "In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends it is because we genuinely want to." I admit that there is a selfish side to the autonomous control available to readers. I predict that the printed word will never be replaced by electronic media because with paper in hand readers can race along, skip ahead, go back, pause, or plunk a book or article down nearby in the to- be-read-later pile. And all of this gets done quietly and peacefully. No clicking, no beeping, no scrolling down or dialing up to reconnect. No passively waiting for the droning TV or movie plot to unfold or rewind.

Surely it's the self-enclosed ecstatic pleasure of reading that makes it suspect to extroverts. Few things can compete with the "high" provided by intensely immersing your mind in another mind's consciousness. You engage, focus, and grapple with the author's writing and then take off. As Proust says, the words the author has written may be his "conclusions," but for the reader they are "incitements." Reading concentrates the mind and incites us to new desires, new ideas, new plans for future action. Too dangerous and passionate an activity?

According to an obscure Freudian author I once happened upon in an academic tome, avid readers like myself suffer from "epistemophilia," or an excessive love of knowing. Such conditions result from sublimating the unconscious and forbidden desire to view the primal scene, that is, your parents' marital coupling! Oh me, what zany pellets of pseudowisdom you can find to chuckle over in omnivorous reading.

I thought it less funny, however, when a psychoanalyst I knew once asked me why I didn't just go into therapy rather than pursue my desire to go to graduate school? His idea of a joke? Or some leftover shards from Freud's broken-down theory that intellectual women deny their femininity by masculine protest? Unfortunately, I could probably never convince such skeptics that after I'd had six children in ten years and reared them in turbulent circumstances, nothing could equal the bliss of having time to read and write. Graduate school is a trip to the amusement park compared to the arduous work of mothering and homemaking.

This truth leads to the final accusation hurled at readers. They (we) use books as an escape from life, or what's called "real life." Well, this charge can sometimes be accurate. The ill and thwarted Fosca, heroine in Stephen Sondheim's Passion, sings, "I do not read to think, I do not read to learn, I do not read to search for truth...I read to dream...to get away from life." Desperately unhappy, this lost lady reads "to fly, to skim...I do not read to swim."

At times reading may be the opium of the educated. The addiction can begin as unhappy (or bored) children seek solace in reading through their local library. My cousin Diane, who is the eldest daughter in a good Alabama Baptist brood of ten children, remembers her obsessive reading began in order to escape the din during a horrific family car excursion to Williamsburg. But, as so often happens, you start out reading to fly, and end up swimming. Diane, alone of all her siblings and high school classmates, went on to get her Ph.D.

No, once thoroughly immersed, constant readers aim not to flee from the world but to dive in and try to learn everything in the world worth knowing. With the goal of omniscience firmly in place you can embark upon an endless voyage, and never become beached in boredom. As Arthur Krystal writes in the spring issue of the American Scholar, you should try to reach the proper parameters of knowledge even when forced to admit "I'm not entirely sure what I do need to know." Yet, without enough facts and information, "one cannot begin to understand how the end of the second millennium came to have the shape and temper it has." No excuses accepted. Get thee to the library and read.