The Rewards of Reading Books

By CLIFTON FADIMAN

The pleasure of reading a good book is not passive, like the pleasure you get from a movie or a TV show. It is active. It involves you. It makes demands on your understanding and imagination.

Books are not a substitute for life. They are a part of life, like love and parenthood and doing one's chosen work in the world. A book that you enjoy becomes a part of you forever. It may offer adventure, surprise, the shock of a new idea. It may offer information, consolation, inspiration. It may offer laughter. It may offer that deepening of the mind that comes from the contemplation of tragic art. . .

The regular reader of books is not bounded by his day-to­day experience. Through books, whether fiction or non-fiction, he can get a sense of the lives of thousands of human beings, living in all imaginable times and places, thinking all imaginable thoughts, feeling all imaginable emotions.

Good books are enjoyable in themselves. But they can be more than that. They can be signposts helping you to make your way through a bewildering world.