If you ask someone why reading matters, they’ll likely tell you what you already know. They'll say it expands your vocabulary, it's good for your memory, it makes you more clever, or it makes you do good in school.
These things are true. Reading does make you smarter. You hear it from learned parents, librarians, and educators often because it's something they see every day. But to stop there would be to overlook some of the most fascinating effects that books have on us.
Before we get to the lesser-known benefits, it’s helpful to briefly acknowledge the ones you already know.
This is arguably the most talked-about benefit, and for good reason.
If you're a teen who reads novels regularly, you often have better communication skills than a teen who reads little or none at all. The nuances of language use permeate throughout and through-in your brain, and, like a threaded needle through fabric, everything you say and write is stitched with their colors. You recognize wit and humor, formal language, or sarcasm. You have the perfect words to express yourself!
Reading also teaches the brain to stay on a thing for longer periods of time. It strengthens patience and concentration. Social media feeds demand that we flick our attention every few seconds. Books, by contrast, invite us to slow down and be mentally present.
Books help us learn history, science, philosophy, culture, psychology, politics, and human experiences beyond our immediate environment.
You can study mediaeval Japan in the morning, space exploration in the afternoon, and the pyramids of Egypt by evening, all from the comfort of your own home. Reading has always been associated with intellectual growth. That's why the author Frederic Douglas says that the pathway to freedom itself is literacy.
But now, we are leaving the basics behind. Here, the conversation gets interesting.
Most people only get to live one physical life. But readers experience hundreds.
You will see and feel the fears of a lonely, blind French girl in World War II if you read Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. You think art thieves steal art only for the money until you read Frankel's The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession.
And if you are a young woman, you will be fascinated by both the turbulence and thrills of growing and becoming in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
As you read a novel, your brain takes on the perspective of another person, if only temporarily. For a few hours, readers borrow someone else’s eyes, feelings, conflicts, and hopes. This experience is life-changing.
Having lived in different minds and cultures through stories for years, you find it harder to see the world in narrow ways.
We get lonely from time to time. Even with our classmates, family, or online communities we are part of, we can feel deeply misunderstood. Books often fill that void. There are many readers who relate to characters who think like them, fear like them, dream like them, or struggle like them. Foreign students find solace in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah. If you have read this book, you will certainly know why. Occasionally a paragraph can make a person feel less alone than an entire day of conversation.
This is especially true in adolescence and young adulthood, when people are still figuring out who they are, where they belong, and what their purpose is.
Readers talk about some books as if they were friendships rather than things.
And there’s a reason people go back to their favorite novels. When life is stressful, familiar books can be soothing to the soul, like visiting a cherished friend from your past.
When Adichie talked about "the danger of a single story," she discussed the unfairness of seeing a person or a people through only one lens and judging them from that single perspective. That will not happen to you if you read a lot. People are too layered as individuals to be defined by stereotypes.
Literary fiction, in particular, helps us become more empathetic because we get to see and feel other people's feelings, reasons, and points of view.
Reading makes us less harsh on one another. People who read learn that people aren't always as easy to understand as they seem at first. Bad guys may be what they are because they are hurting from neglect or a lack of love. Even heroes are flawed. Many people are fighting things that others can't see.
We are influenced daily by algorithms, what we think, what we watch, what we believe, and even what we feel. So we react faster than we think.
But a good book causes you to think. Books are for pausing and reflecting. They are not short-form content designed to elicit an immediate emotional response. Readers stop, ask questions, analyze, disagree, interpret. And that’s why authoritarian governments throughout history have so often feared books. It is hard to control independent thought.
Readers become more comfortable with complexity, uncertainty, and nuance over time. They don’t depend on headlines and trends to form their opinions.
A lot of young people have trouble expressing themselves. And it's not that they don't feel anything. They just don't know how to say it.
You can learn words and expressions for a variety of emotions that you have felt: sadness, longing, resentment, shame, awe, relief, contempt, and a thousand others! People are better able to handle their feelings when they can clearly name them. This is one reason why books have remained important for so many years and in so many cultures. Stories help people make sense of feelings that would be hard to understand otherwise.
Dostoevsky was famous, in part, for his penetrating insight into guilt, suffering, fear, and human contradiction. We love his writing because it talked about feelings that many of us try to hide. See?
Movies and TV shows portray what characters and worlds look like. But books have other effects. They work with the reader’s imagination. When you read a novel, your brain gets to work, building faces, landscapes, voices, movements, atmospheres. You are invited to be active participants, not passive observers. It's like a character says, "Closer. See my world! Step into my shoes and feel them for a little while.”
This mental exercise develops creativity in meaningful ways. Regular readers, especially children and teenagers, often develop into better storytellers, problem-solvers, and creative thinkers by regularly using their imagination. Like how exercise makes muscles stronger, reading strengthens the imagination.
Not every reader turns into a writer, of course. But many writers started out as obsessive readers.
Before she was an author herself, Maya Angelou learned her craft by reading for years. Before Achebe changed the African story in English literature, he too was a reader, reading stories from both African and European traditions.
Reading introduces people to rhythm, structure, dialogue, pacing, symbolism, and emotional storytelling almost without their being aware of it. There are years of loving books, and then sometimes young readers find out they want to make something too, something that might someday live in someone else's imagination. That’s a natural urge. Stories beget stories.
Feature Image by Brett Jordan on Unsplash