Reading isn't important because it helps get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.
Fiction, especially, is a counterbalance to the news, to Twitter, to the land of outrage, and tribes, and black-and-white truths, to mind-narrowing algorithms. Books are long. They are deep. They give you space. To BE. To think of the nuances of humanity. The complexity of us.
Books can make us. I was made by parents but also by Winnie-the-Pooh and The Outsiders and Vox and The Catcher in the Rye and A Bridge to Terabithia and war and love poetry and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and 1984 and The Odyssey and Different Seasons and Brighton Rock.
Books saved me. Reading fiction. There's nothing do-goody, dry, dull or boring about books. They're the most vital, intimate, personal, mind-altering, thought-twisting, friend-giving, empathy-strengthening, thrill-riding, emotional, world-shaking technology we will ever have.
......I'm not drunk.
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