With the uncertainty of everything going on in the world, it can be difficult to find comfort. Not knowing what today will bring has led to a lot of stress and anxiety for many students and adults alike. It’s important to find ways to cope, like just laying down on the couch with a good book and devouring its pages.

As we grow up, we tend to lose our interests in reading as we become so busy with our everyday lives. Most people don’t read another book in their lives after graduating high school which is genuinely heartbreaking as books hold a very special place in my heart. 

Reading books is so beneficial not just academically, but also emotionally. It’s so easy to sit down and use reading to help escape reality for several hours on end. Immersing yourself in a different universe allows you to temporarily forget about all the craziness of the real world in a positive way.

Reading endlessly broadens the imagination. The reading world is endless, and can spark so many creative ideas for. Especially during the pandemic, reading can help you cope and try out new hobbies, as well as establish your voice and teach you to better express your thoughts and the way you feel. 

Reading can change us in significant ways and even play a role in shaping our values. Books open our minds to new ideas. Seeing the world through characters who might be very different from you opens your eyes to diverse perspectives. It’s a part of human nature that our values don’t change easily. We don’t like our beliefs to be challenged, but books do this in a way that makes us more receptive to different points of view. This is a quality unique to books, because sometimes, even facts can’t change our beliefs. Books introduce new ideas in a non hostile way that makes us more willing to accept or understand them. We can better empathize with the characters we read about and their problems, which we may not usually be familiar to. 

Reading can teach us important life lessons through people and situations that we as readers can relate to and provides a unique way to expand our knowledge. Books like The Hunger Games and Divergent, for example, taught millions of people in our generation to question authority and the way things have been done. This can be reflected in our actions in the real world, like with the Black Lives Matter protests.

From helping broaden your imagination to teaching you life lessons as well as just boosting your mood, reading is a more powerful and important part of our lives than most people realize.