I don't have a lot of time for a long post, but I wanted to put out the question-why do you read (books)?
Imagination-when I was growing up, my household wasn't the happiest, and it was great to escape into a book. I am a very visual person, and I was able to co-create spaces and places in my head, very vividly, such that on a good day, with a good book, it all became quite real.
Empathy-I think this might be the most important reason reading is important for a society. It's maybe a very special subset of imagination, but learning how other people think and what experiences they have gone through, or think are important to tell another person about helps me understand "the other" better. It's also great "talking" to Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, or Kerouac!
Connections between what what you are reading now and have read before-either recurring themes or structure that you serendipitously notice, or the dialogue between different authors you get to be part of.
Language-Just the sheer joy of beautiful sentences:
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
Or
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
