The Power of Reading

Warning: I’m going to nerd out about books here.

“Reading books is good for you”. Every parent/teacher says this. How many parents actually read, though? How many of us spend at least 10 mins reading? There’s one reason: we don’t know the actual WHY we should read books. There’s many reasons, and I’ll break it down into 4 points for you, with additional reading tips at the end.

1) Fiction and nonfiction (to some extent) gives you people to know. Yale professor Harold Bloom quotes, “You can never know enough people”. Look at your ‘circle’ of people. Most of the people you talk to, your friends are like-minded people. You don’t know what it’s like to not be you. Books give you that. Books introduce you to so many people, cultures, traditions, etc. It is an endless possibility. I can sit here, and imagine what Russia would be like right now, because I have a book in my hand. Seeing things from a different perspective is not a natural quality humans possess, but one quality which is necessary to human life. Let me give you an example. I recently read the book, The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara after listening to someone talking about it. Here’s how the story goes. A 12 year old Mariatu is left to die after her hands are cut off in an attack on her village during the Sierra Leone Civil War. Another guy throws a mango to her while running away as she has been starving for days. She crawls to the mango, and takes a bite of it (there’s the title). She gets rescued, travels to Canada as a refugee, and in the journey of recovery, becomes an author and advocate for peace. She lives a life to this day. Now, you have an exam staring at you in 2 days, 5 assignments due this week, and you think your life is hard. When you read this book, you realize how big of a lie you told yourself. Your life is as easy as it can get. That book introduced you not only to Mariatu Kamara, but her perspectives on life ( it is an co-authored autobiography). Other notable works is The Hundred Armchairs by Jeyamohan and Man’s Search of Meaning by Victor E. Frankl.

2) Mistakes are prevented. Why do we learn history? To learn how ancient people lived? Yes, but more importantly, to prevent the mistakes they made. The Treaty of Versailles was horrible, which led to another world war merely 30 years later, and then we made a better treaty after World War 2, and so far, there’s not been another world war (touch wood). Another example is Medieval Europe. For those who read European history know Medieval Europe was horrific. Animals were brutally hurt. Punishments included but not limited to tearing the criminal limb by limb and burning him alive. But then, the printing press became popular. Authors like Charles Dickens emerged, and people began to read. They were shocked by the violence in the novels , and empathized with the people, and those practices declined, and thankfully, are now extinct. You may ask, they were seeing it every day, why not stop it then? That, my friends, is the power of words. When they were seeing it and possibly executing it, that was the normal and the only perspective. When Dickens gave a new perspective, the perspective of the guy being torn apart, the reader felt being torn apart. He realized what his act feels like. 

Reading not only gives you knowledge, it gives you perspectives, it gives you mistakes, and it gives you solutions. 

I thought of fitting it all into 1 day, but I couldn’t (my endless ranting knows no end 😂) so I’ll be back with part two tomorrow.