Books are more than simple pieces of paper with words on them (or, in the case of digital books, a bunch of pixels on a screen). They’re a door into another world, whether that’s one full of fiction and imagination or a factual world that teaches you incredible new things. World Book Day is all about celebrating the wonderful power of books and the joy of reading. It’s especially meant to help encourage a love of reading in children, but people of all ages can recognise and celebrate the day.
The absolute best way to celebrate this day would be to find the time to do some reading. Do you have a book you just can’t get around to finishing? Today’s the time to curl up on the couch or a blanket outside with a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy every last page.
Benefits of Reading
1. Reading dares you to grow.
Before you can read, you must learn how. You must push yourself to interact with meaningless lines and squiggles until they transform into stories, characters and ideas. And once you master picture books, you move forward to children’s novels. Novels without pictures. Classic literature. Books in foreign languages. Reading is an exercise in perseverance, in which you constantly challenge yourself to achieve more than you did with your last book.
2. Reading challenges your perspective.
When you experience life through the eyes of another, you encounter diverse angles on life’s most common situations. Talented authors will naturally inspire empathy for their characters, and empathising with viewpoints different from your own can feel uncomfortable. Extremely uncomfortable. While reading doesn’t mean that you’ll agree with different perspectives, it does offer you the opportunity to understand them.
3. Reading brings life.
If you’re a book lover, chances are that you’ve experienced reading to be a rejuvenating activity that renews your energy and elevates your mood. Numerous book lovers have testified that reading gives them purpose, helps them persevere through difficulty and unlocks parts of themselves they didn’t even know existed. For all of the reasons in this article and more, reading makes us feel optimistically, breathlessly, tenaciously alive.
