The simple joy called “reading”..

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While on the topic of reading, here’s a post by Me on reading. I loved it totally. The simple way in which she’s put forward the joys of reading is heart warming.

So with her permission, here it is for you all to see, if you’ve not already been to her blog and seen it that is..

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading books. I remember buying them. Just like every child, I remember choosing the one that had the prettiest illustrations – to disappointedly learn, afterwards, that the story itself didn’t add much. By that time, I did not realize that a story could be told by images, even only by images. Probably, I had not a clue of the amount of knowledge that had been acquired only by those images, even when they were accompanied by a poorly written story.

Reading is, in fact, invoking a bunch of images in our minds and connecting them to one another and to information we have already gathered during our lifetime. We read about an environment, we create an image of that environment; we read about a person, we picture that person in our minds. We read about a character’s feelings and, all of a sudden, we feel incredibly close to that character. That’s why books can be excellent friends. We’re friends with the characters or with the author of the book – someone who shared all those moments and words with us. Consequently, reading isn’t as lonely an exercice as it seems. Reading always includes a fair deal of cumplicity.

But, besides invoking images, reading instigates. It, at the same time, instigates our rationality and lets our emotions flourish. It’s good for our intelligence, helps us concentrate and calms us down. Reading challenges us; it puts our capacity of linking ideas into work and forces us to take positions, to think about our preferences and beliefs. By reading, we think more loosely and find a growing number of points of view to ponder. Reading leads us to look for and find solutions. People who don’t read are missing as much as the ones who don’t write. Living becomes a lot better when we find the right words to describe it.

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Tags: joys, read, reading