Why Should I Read?
“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.... You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
Angela Carter (1940–1992), British author.
Why read? Why should I read the book before it comes out in cinema? Why is settling down with a good book better then sitting on the couch watching The Simpson’s reruns? I have often pondered the merits of reading, but you don’t realise the advantages until you actually begin reading. Until I unlocked my first real book I couldn’t have dreamed of the wonders and marvels that it opens to you. It’s just that when you do read you discover how exquisite the delights of reading are.
Books can transport you to different places, worlds, times, people, anywhere you can imagine without leaving your own room.
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. Picking up a book is like picking up a world that is waiting to be explored. Whether fiction or fact they can take you away with them, engulf you and make you apart of their environment. They can scare the wits out of you, make you cry, make you laugh, the more pages you read the harder it is to shut the book. Every book is a great adventure. Within the pages lie stories untold, places never ventured and new people to meet. No book is alike, no story the same.
Reading is not strange. It seems that many people do not want to read or do not think it is necessary. They believe that people who read are “nerds”, “geeks”, or ‘bookworms’.
This is not true. I read because it is something that passes the time peacefully and it alleviates ignorance. Reading for fun is normal; it improves a person’s imaginati...
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...ge themselves with that. Novels are great space fillers in my suitcase whenever I go on holiday. There’s nothing like sitting on a beach with the sun blazing down on you reading the adventures of Moby Dick, although maybe Jaws wouldn’t be a good one if you intend on going swimming.
Books can help pass time, at airports, on train journeys, on flights, when your grounded, anytime, anywhere you can pull out a book and become immersed in it. So bring a book wherever you go just in case you happen to get the urge to read. They’re portable, they’re handy, and they’re a whole world within a few pages and a cover. A book can take the reader places they only dreamed of, it increases vocabulary without the reader having knowledge of it, and they can teach a vast majority of subjects to alleviate ignorance.
And remember a book is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.
This question, burning in Guy's mind, is quenched by an old English professor that teaches Guy the three reasons why books are so important. One, they have a quality, a texture, that record all records of life good or bad. Two, they offer their own kind of leisure, stemming off the idea of meditating and developing an individuals mind. Third, the freedom to act based on rules one and two.
Reading a book is in many ways the same as exercising the muscles in your arm, as you are feeding your brain new information and ideas of life. Life is short and I believe that you should always be positive and do the things that you want without people telling you that you are wrong. The following Novels have taught me various aspects, which I have and still am using to make my life a memorable one as well as a positive one.
I began to read not out of entertainment but out of curiosity, for in each new book I discovered an element of real life. It is possible that I will learn more about society through literature than I ever will through personal experience. Having lived a safe, relatively sheltered life for only seventeen years, I don’t have much to offer in regards to worldly wisdom. Reading has opened doors to situations I will never encounter myself, giving me a better understanding of others and their situations. Through books, I’ve escaped from slavery, been tried for murder, and lived through the Cambodian genocide. I’ve been an immigrant, permanently disabled, and faced World War II death camps. Without books, I would be a significantly more close-minded person. My perception of the world has been more significantly impacted by the experiences I've gained through literature than those I've gained
When we read books we think. We think about how the point of view of the main character does the stuff that they do. Books make us different from others. Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect example. She walks,
My dad taught me that books could be my teachers, my mom taught me that our backyard could be my classroom, and my sister showed me that you could bring books into the swimming pool. I did not know it when I would spend hours in the pool reading a book that my parents weren’t encouraging it in vain, but my family life, for good reason, was centered on books. We were the planets orbiting around one sun that was the bookshelf. Little did I know that books would be the catalyst to academic success in my early life, and I owe it all to my family. Although a life with a book in your nose might seem boring, I was never bored. Living through the characters vicariously, I explored Narnia with Lucy, attended Hogwarts with Harry, and rode dragons with Eragon. Of course
There are two types of people in the world, those who read and those who do not. The latter category doesn’t only contain those who are illiterate and unable to read, but those who are unwilling to pick up a book and sit with it for a while. Those who are too busy, or bored by books do not understand their weight. Books do more than just provide entertainment for a long airplane flight. They provide world’s to escape too, concepts to explore and feelings that stay with you. The books I’ve read have positively and negatively shaped my life from early childhood books to required school readings each has changed the way I perceive the world or how I visualize my education and future.
Mason Cooley says about reading “Reading gives us some place to go when we have to stay where we are .” Reading is like a journey you can take when you want to go somewhere. Everyone always wants to imagine they are in the journey with the character in the book. When the story is over the person that is reading never wants to leave the journey. Everyone starts a new journey when they open a new book to read. Sometimes people who read don’t have a journey with the character; they just want to read because they don’t have anything else to do. For me reading is really fun to do.
In “The Lonely, Good Company of Books,” by Richard Rodriguez, you learn that Rodriguez had read hundreds of books before he was a teenager, but never truly understood what he was reading. His parents never encouraged him to read and thought the only time you needed to read, was for work. Since his parents never encouraged Rodriguez to read it effected how he perceived books.
When you read, especially fiction, you experience a broad sweep of human life. You gain access to the thoughts of others, look at history through another person’s eyes and learn from their mistakes, something that you otherwise would not be able to experience.
My earliest memories can be found at the hands of paperback novels. Books were my escape from the world around me. The thrill of being able to leave behind the world and it’s baggage and enter another that books provided captivated me, and left an impact on me. The emotion I experienced solely from taking a small step into another person’s story was unlike any I had felt before. I desperately wanted others to feel what I had felt, and love whatever I had become entranced by with the same passion as I did.
When reading a book, I try to be able to relate myself to the narrator by putting myself in their shoes. I often find myself engulfed in books that I can relate to my life. Often books can work with your emotions and hook onto your. Books have impacted my life by helping me realize that I am not alone in my situations. Books used to be my escape from the world when I felt that I was the only one with my problems.
Ever since I was a child, I've never liked reading. Every time I was told to read, I would just sleep or do something else instead. In "A Love Affair with Books" by Bernadete Piassa tells a story about her passion for reading books. Piassa demonstrates how reading books has influenced her life. Reading her story has given me a different perspective on books. It has showed me that not only are they words written on paper, they are also feelings and expressions.
Maybe, my sister and I inherited this live of reading from my father, or perhaps, our environment influenced us, but we were hooked onto books from a very early age. We would even take them to social gatherings, where we sure that we would get bored, and then just disappear into a quiet corner and spend the evening reading.
Nowadays, many people think reading is not necessary, since there are so many sources of information and types of entertainment, such as TV, cinema and the Internet. I believe they are wrong because reading is very beneficial in many ways.
In the contemporary era, if you don’t have any desire or need for information, there will be no good future for you. Life is very much pre-determined. Books not only increase your intellect but also influence your reading and writing skills. Books can be read again and again as they are the most credible and precious media of mass communication.