I Read It, So What? To Read Is to Be Active in Life

Yekta Kopan, Okudum da Ne Oldu? Yapay Zeka Çağında Okur Olmak (I Read It, So What? Being a Reader in the Age of Artificial Intelligence), Can Yayınları, 2026.

Dear Young Comrades,

At a secondary-school talk, a student asks the writer across from them: "What happens if we never read a book?" The writer finds the answer they give in the moment a weak one, goes home, stands before the shelves, and asks the same question of themselves: I read it, so what?

Yekta Kopan's new book from Can Yayınları, Okudum da Ne Oldu? Yapay Zeka Çağında Okur Olmak (I Read It, So What? Being a Reader in the Age of Artificial Intelligence), opens with that scene. In this piece we will first introduce the book, then take its question one step further and ask: how does reading turn a person into an active subject inside life? And why does being active matter so much today?

Summary: Fourteen Theses

1. The book does not ask what reading is good for. It asks how reading changes a person. By telling the story of his own life as a reader, Kopan looks for the effect of reading, not its utility.
2. A book, and a film, is a transfer of experience. We do not have to live everything ourselves in order to learn what others have lived. Humanity advanced because it could pass experience from one generation to the next.
3. Whoever tries to learn everything by living it lives the same pains and the same mistakes again. Learning from other people's experience is both a saving of time and pain and a form of solidarity.
4. The real effect of reading is to move a person from passivity to activity. The reader stops being someone to whom things happen and becomes someone who tries to give their life a direction.
5. The passive person accepts the world "as it is". The active person asks "why is it like this?" Reading is the school of that question.
6. Reading shows the alternatives and gives a language. Whoever reads other lives sees that their own life is not the only possible one, and learns to name the injustice they live.
7. Reading leads out of loneliness. As Kopan stresses, the reader sees that their trouble is a shared one. A shared trouble is the beginning of shared action.
8. The real matter is not to accumulate knowledge. It is to change life for the better. The worth of reading is measured by how far it feeds human dignity and the demand for a humane life.
9. Human dignity is not a matter for bargaining. A good book, or a good film, teaches a person not to stay silent where someone's dignity is trampled.
10. The culture of being there is what reading looks like in life. To be there when an injustice happens, when a friend is in difficulty, when a trouble is shared: that is to turn the values we have read into the values we live.
11. The values that make us who we are are kept alive together. Solidarity, justice, respect for labour, sharing: these cannot be protected alone. They stand by the feeling of being together.
12. The present order produces passivity and loneliness. The algorithmic feed, the ready-made summaries, the endless scroll: all of them want a person who does not choose, does not ask, only consumes, and stays alone.
13. To be an active and conscious citizen is to take part in life. The person who does not leave their fate to others, who joins in decisions, who defends their own right and the rights of others: that is the ripest fruit of reading.
14. Reading is the beginning of being active, not the end. Whoever does not test what they have read against life has left the reading unfinished.

Now let us go into the detail.

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Getting to Know the Book

Yekta Kopan is a writer we know from his stories and novels, and from a life spent inside the world of books through publishing and television. An award-winning story writer, he has not only written literature. For years he has read it, talked about readers, and carried books to other people. In this book he appears not as a narrator but as a reader.

The book's point of departure is that secondary-school student's question. Instead of brushing the question off, Kopan takes it seriously and makes a journey through his own shelves: the books he read again, the ones he forgot, the ones he left half-finished, the ones he loved. What did each of them change in his life? As İpek Özbey's review in Sözcü reports, Kopan says that reading taught him to feel with other people, showed him that the difficulties he lived were not his alone, and taught him to live with what he could not overcome. In his own words, sometimes he carried words like a burden, and sometimes he gave his burden to words.

The book's most important choice is this: it refuses to defend reading by the measure of "usefulness". It does not fall into the self-help talk of "reading helps your career; successful people read". It looks instead at how reading changes a person. That is why the stress in the subtitle matters: "to be a reader". In Fromm's language, the book carries reading from the mode of having to the mode of being. It is not a matter of collecting books, or of being able to say "I read it". It is a matter of becoming someone else by reading.

The book's stress on the age of artificial intelligence is no accident either. In the age of summaries, ready answers, and machines that say "you do not need to read this, I will tell you", the meaning of reading has to be asked again. Kopan asks the question not in the language of fear, but as an invitation to think together. We want to answer that invitation.

Books and Films: A Transfer of Experience

One of the most basic functions of reading, and of a good film along with it, is often missed: it lets us learn what others have lived without living it ourselves.

Think about it. Must we go to war to learn what war is, be exiled to understand exile, go hungry to grasp hunger, fall from that scaffolding to know what a workplace killing means? Of course not. Whoever reads Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front feels the youth of a generation that died in the trenches as their own youth. Whoever reads Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath accompanies a family torn from its land. Whoever watches Yılmaz Güney's Yol or Sürü feels, within a few hours and in their own body, an Anatolia woven from custom, poverty and repression. The workers in Orhan Kemal's novels, Sabahattin Ali's towns, Yaşar Kemal's Çukurova carry lives we have never seen into our memory.

The history of humanity is itself the history of this transfer. If every generation had to discover everything from nothing, we would still be learning how to light a fire. Language, writing, the book, then photography and cinema: all of them are tools that carry experience from one person to another, from one generation to the next. In Marx's phrase, the tradition of dead generations weighs on the brains of the living. But the same tradition, when it is read properly, is the greatest accumulation the living have in their hands. Books and films are the carriers of social memory.

There is a saying among people: the clever person learns from their own mistake, the wise person from someone else's. Whoever tries to learn everything by living it lives the same pains, the same defeats, the same mistakes over and over. This is not only an individual waste. It is a social tragedy. A generation that does not know the 12 September coup cannot see how coups are prepared. A worker who has not read how earlier strikes were won or lost falls into the same traps again. A society that does not know how fascism rose in the 1920s and 1930s cannot recognise it in its new disguises.

A path: how do we learn from other people's experience?

Learning from other people's experience does not happen by itself. It too has a way, a method:

• Make room for testimony. Read memoirs, oral histories, letters, diaries. To hear what a generation lived, in that generation's own voice, is the truest transfer.
• Use the novel and the film "to live another life". While you read or watch, ask yourself: what would I have done in their place? Why did they choose this? What did the choice cost?
• Read the defeats too, not only the victories. The most instructive experiences are often the struggles that were lost. Knowing why they were lost is the condition of winning the next time.
• Talk with older people. What the elders in your family, your neighbourhood and your workplace tell are unwritten books. Listening to them, and recording them when you can, is a social duty.
• Talk with others about what you have read and watched. Two people who watch the same film see different things. When they talk, the experience multiplies.
• Pass on what you have learned. You too are a source of experience for the next generation. Write, tell, share.

But one point should not be missed. Learning from other people's experience does not mean never living anything. The book and the film show us the road. We still do the walking. The experience we have read becomes real knowledge when it meets our own experience.

Passive and Active: A Distinction

What do we mean by "being active"? You will remember it from grammar. In the active voice the subject does the action ("Ali opened the door"). In the passive voice the action is done to the subject ("The door was opened"). In the passive sentence, who did the action is often invisible.

Life too can be lived in these two voices. For the person who lives passively, everything "happens": prices rise, one is sacked, the school closes, the war begins. All of these are done to them, somewhere outside them, by unseen subjects. They only endure. The person who lives actively asks: who did this? Why? Whom does it serve? And, most important: what can I, what can we, do?

This distinction has a long past in the history of philosophy. Spinoza calls the states in which a person is dragged along by external causes passivity (passion), and the actions that arise from their own understanding activity. For him, freedom begins with understanding the causes that determine us. Fromm says that modern people can be constantly busy and still passive, because they do not choose what they do. They do what is imposed on them from outside. Marx places the distinction inside history: people make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing. To be active is to know those circumstances and to move in order to change them.

What these three thinkers share is this: activity begins with knowledge. You cannot be active against what determines you without knowing it. Reading enters exactly here.

How Does Reading Give Life a Direction?

It teaches how to ask

As children we ask "why?" of everything. As we grow, the question is slowly silenced: "That's how it has to be", "Everyone does it this way", "Don't interfere." Reading brings the silenced question back. A good novel makes you wonder why a character acted that way. A good history book shows how today was born from yesterday. A good book of philosophy teaches you to doubt even what you know most certainly. In Bertolt Brecht's poem "Questions from a Worker Who Reads", the worker reads only the names of kings in the history book and begins to ask: who, then, built the cities, who raised the walls? Reading gives birth to the question, and the question to activity.

It shows the alternatives

The strongest prop of passivity is the feeling that "it could not be otherwise". The neighbourhood you were born in, the family's work, the lives around you come to you as the only possible world. Reading breaks that wall. Whoever reads the lives of people in another country, another century, another social order sees that their own life is neither natural nor inevitable. Seeing that something could be otherwise is the first condition of setting out to change it.

It gives a language

You cannot change what you cannot name. A worker comes home tired every day, feels that they are not receiving the return on their labour, and does not know how to say it. One day they meet concepts such as "surplus-value", "exploitation" and "organising", and what they live suddenly takes on a meaning. A woman, by reading, learns the name of invisible labour in the home. A young person learns the name of unemployment. A student learns the name of inequality in education. Reading makes the experience we live thinkable, discussable and changeable.

It widens time

The passive person lives only the present. Everything that arrives looks new and inexplicable. The reader stands inside history. They know the likenesses of today's crisis, the precedents of today's repression, the earlier examples of today's struggle. That knowledge gives them both composure and courage: this has been lived before, people have resisted, people have won.

It leads out of loneliness

This is one of the things Kopan underlines most in the book. The reader sees that their trouble does not belong to them alone. That can remain an individual consolation. There is also a step beyond it. If the trouble is shared, the remedy can be shared too. The person whom reading leads out of loneliness is a person ready to move together with others.

People Who Read, Lives That Change

We can see in history how reading makes a person active.

Maxim Gorky spent his childhood in poverty, without school, as an apprentice. The books he read in secret at night showed him that another life was possible. He then became a writer who opened that door for millions of readers. The title of My Universities, in which he tells his own life, is meaningful for exactly this reason. His university was the books he read and the people he knew.

In our history the Village Institutes (Köy Enstitüleri, 1940–1954) made peasant children into readers, and some of them became writers, teachers and founders. Mahmut Makal's Bizim Köy (Our Village) put the reality of the village on the country's agenda, through the eyes of a village teacher. The peasant child who read was no longer someone others wrote about, but someone who wrote their own story. One of the fears behind the closing of the Institutes was this: a peasant who reads is a peasant who questions.

In the industrial cities of the nineteenth century, workers set up reading rooms and workers' libraries after a fourteen-hour working day. Newspapers were read aloud in the workshops. These reading practices were the incubator of the unions, the workers' associations and the struggle for rights. The history of the eight-hour day is also the history of winning time for reading, thinking and organising.

What these examples share is this. Reading did not only make these people knowledgeable. It made them subjects. They stopped being the object of a story others wrote, and began to write their own.

Why Should We Be Active?

So far we have talked about how reading feeds activity. Why, then, does being active matter so much?

Because passivity is not neutral. When you do not decide, someone else decides in your place. When you do not ask, someone else answers in your place. The person who does not mix in politics does not stay outside politics. They only become the object of other people's politics. Passivity always serves someone.

Because the present order produces passivity. The feed of social media chooses what we will see, in our place. The algorithm works for the interest of a company that earns more the longer we stay. The endless scroll makes a mind that consumes without choosing, without thinking, without asking. As we saw when we discussed why we deceive ourselves, the age of the algorithm is a factory of false correlations, and its favourite customer is the passive user.

Because artificial intelligence is bidding to take the labour of thinking from us. Asking for a summary of a book is not bad in itself. But when we put every question to the machine and accept the answer without looking at its source, we have handed the labour of thinking to a monopoly's server. According to the assessments of Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University, and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, the decline in reading began before artificial intelligence. Summary machines deepen that decline, and a large share of those who search now stop at the machine's answer and never go to the source. The process we wrote about earlier, the expropriation of the general intellect, is lived at the level of the reader like this. First our common accumulation is taken, then it is sold back to us as "saving time". Reading is the way of remaining the owner of our own mind in this process.

Because activity is what it is to be human. Marx says that what distinguishes the human from other living beings is the capacity to transform the world consciously. The bee builds a comb, but the worst architect still designs what they will build in their head first. To be active is to use this human capacity. To live passively is to give up a piece of being human itself.

And because activity does not happen alone. A very important distinction has to be made here. Self-help books also say "take control of your life". The activity they propose is an individual race in which everyone tries to save their own career. The activity we mean is the ability to move together with others. A single worker is passive before the boss. Organised workers are active. A single student is helpless before the system. Students who move together can change something. This is exactly why it matters that reading leads us out of loneliness. Real activity is shared activity.

The Real Matter: Changing Life for the Better

Everything we have said so far ties to a single aim. Reading, accumulating knowledge, learning from other people's experience, being active: none of these is an aim in itself. The real matter is to change life for the better. The worth of a book, or of a film, is measured by what it finally adds to that change.

Human dignity

The greatest books we have read, and the greatest films we have watched, share a vein: a voice that does not stay silent where human dignity is trampled. Jean Valjean, who spends years in the galleys for stealing a loaf in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Dostoevsky's "insulted and injured"; the ordinary people in Nazım Hikmet's Human Landscapes from My Country... All of them say the same thing to us. A person, even if poor, even if defeated, even if they have done wrong, is a being with dignity, and that dignity is not a matter for bargaining.

Reading gives a person this sensitivity: to know that it is not "normal" when a worker is humiliated at the workplace, when a woman's voice is stifled, when a migrant is shut out as an "other", when a child's labour is exploited. The sense of dignity is the source of the first objection to injustice.

A humane life

Human dignity does not remain an abstract principle. It becomes a concrete demand: a humane life. To be able to fill one's stomach, to have a roof, to be healthy, to be able to study, to receive the return on one's labour, to find time to rest, to read, to be with the people one loves. These are not luxuries. They are the minimum conditions of being human.

Reading also teaches us the history of these demands. The eight-hour day, free education, the right to health, the right to a union, women's right to vote and to be elected: every condition of a humane life that we have today is a right that was once called "impossible", and that someone won by paying a price. The person who knows this knows that demands called "impossible" today can also be won one day.

The culture of being there

Perhaps the most concrete counterpart of reading in life is this: being there.

To be beside a friend on a hard day. To stand beside a workmate who has suffered an injustice at the workplace. To be present where a house in the neighbourhood is demolished, a school is closed, a tree is cut. To be there at a hearing, a commemoration, an action, a night of solidarity. To be a partner in a mourning, a joy, a struggle.

This culture is weakening today. Posting from behind a screen, leaving a like, showing a reaction, takes the place of "being there". A digital reaction is a participation in which the body and one's time are not given, and no price is paid. Being there is to put forward one's own time, one's labour, one's presence. For a person, the most valuable thing is who was beside them on a hard day. It is the same for a struggle.

The books we read show us countless examples of "being there": those who keep watch in the strike tent, the mothers who wait at the prison gate, those who stand on the land to protect a village's water. Reading carries these examples to us. Keeping them alive depends on our being there.

Being together with the values that make us who we are

A person cannot carry a value alone. Solidarity, justice, respect for labour, sharing, keeping one's word, protecting the weak: these are values lived together, protected together, and passed from generation to generation. They are also what makes a community a community. People who have a common language, a common memory, a common world of values can say "we".

The present order wears this feeling of "we" down in a systematic way. In a world where everyone races with everyone, and everyone lives their own career, their own consumption, their own screen, people live in the same building and do not know each other's names. Loneliness is becoming an illness of the age. Reading is a bridge against that loneliness. An invisible bond forms among those who read the same book, watch the same film, learn the same poem by heart. Turning that bond into a concrete community, a reading group, an association, a union, a circle of friendship, is in our hands.

Taking part in life as an active and conscious citizen

And in the end all of this meets in one place: taking part in life as an active and conscious citizen.

Citizenship is not only an identity card, or going to the ballot once every five years. The conscious citizen is the person who wants a share in the decisions of the country, the city, the neighbourhood and the workplace they live in. The person who asks which law serves whom, who wonders where the budget is spent, who follows how the municipality, the school and the hospital are run, who objects to an unjust decision. The person who defends someone else's right as much as their own.

The unconscious citizen is the one who consents to being governed. They believe what they are told, they watch what happens, they step aside saying "nothing will come of me". And that stepping aside leaves the decisions in the hands of a few people.

Reading is the school of being a conscious citizen. It teaches one to see the news behind the news, the reality behind the figure, the interest behind the discourse. But reading alone is not enough. What has been read has to be turned into participation. Joining an association, taking a place in a union, going to a neighbourhood meeting, joining a petition, raising a voice against an injustice: that is the counterpart, in life, of the person who reads.

The active and conscious citizen is the person who carries reading from the pages of the book into life itself.

The Passive Reader, the Active Reader

Reading does not by itself guarantee being active. One can also read passively.

The passive reader	The active reader
Accepts what they read as it is	Asks questions of what they read, and objects
Collects books and boasts of the number	Is changed by what they read, and looks at what they have grasped
Settles for the summary	Goes from the summary to the text, and from the text to the source
Reads alone, and stays alone	Discusses what they have read with others
Uses reading as an escape	Uses reading as a return to life
Reads what the algorithm recommends	Chooses what they will read
Reading ends when the book is closed	Reading is completed when it is tested in life
Treats other people's experience as a curiosity	Draws a lesson from other people's experience and carries it into their own life
Watches from a screen and reacts from a distance	Is there, at the place and the time where it is needed
Is a spectator who consents to being governed	Is a conscious citizen who takes part in decisions

What Should We Do? Tasks for an Active Readership

1. Set up a reading group. At school, at the workplace, in the neighbourhood, in the union. One book a month, one meeting a week. Take reading out of loneliness.
2. Choose what you will read. Do not settle for what the algorithm, the bestseller list or the advertisement recommends. Become curious about a subject and follow it.
3. Take notes while you read, and write questions. Write your objections in the margin. Active reading is a conversation with the text.
4. Make artificial intelligence your tool, not your master. If you have taken a summary, go back to the text and find what the summary left out. If you have received an answer, ask for its source.
5. Write what you have read. A short review, a letter, a blog post. Writing is the deepest form of reading.
6. Test what you have read against life. If a book has shown you an injustice, ask what can be done against that injustice.
7. Watch films, and talk about them together. Organise a film night. Afterwards, discuss what you learned from the experience in the film.
8. Listen to older people, and record testimonies. Gather the unwritten history of your family, your neighbourhood, your workplace.
9. Be there. On a friend's hard day, at the moment a workmate suffers an injustice, in a neighbourhood problem, be there in person, not from behind the screen.
10. Take part in life. Join an association, a union, a neighbourhood assembly, a network of solidarity. Conscious citizenship is learned by taking part.
11. Defend the right to read. Long working hours, expensive books and closing libraries are obstacles in front of the right to read. The right to read is defended together with the right to time and the right to education.

We Read, and a Great Deal Happened

Dear Young Comrades,

Inspired by Kopan's book, we can answer that secondary-school student like this. We would have lived even if we had not read. But we would have lived in a world others described to us, by decisions others made for us, as an extra in a story others wrote.

Reading makes us the subject of that story. It teaches us to learn from other people's experience, and so not to have to live every pain again. It teaches us to ask questions, to see the alternatives, to name what we live, to know that we are not alone. Above all it reminds us how much it matters that human dignity is not a matter for bargaining, that a humane life is everyone's right, and that being there on a hard day, and standing together with the values that make us who we are, is precious. And in the end it calls us from the book whose cover we have closed, from the cinema with its lights on, to life itself: as active and conscious citizens, together with others, to change life for the better.

Kopan says, "I read, and a great deal happened." Let us add: Let us read together, ask together, be there when it is needed, and change things together. Then even more will happen.

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