Reading: a raison d'être

Dharmita Padhi

A step into the library and I am overwhelmed. I hear a flick of the page and the rustle of someone going through a book. Someone giggles in the corner behind the kids section where they are being read to. Next come the smells. I don’t smell just the carpets, but I smell the books and its stories, an inferno from the Hunger Games, the moist smell of the Forbidden Forests from Harry Potter and the smell of new clothes from Sophie Kinsella’s latest book. I feel the wind caress my skin as a dragon flies past me and suddenly am short of breath from running from the ruthless Americans from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

From the broad plains of Middle Earth, to Boo Radley’s mysterious house down the road, books are an alluring challenge, asking you to stretch your imagination, a quiet holiday, away from the pressures of school, a lesson from your mother, a solution to a bored child or a valuable piece of gold. And yet, everything that makes a book, from the story to the suspenseful chapter endings to the feel of the pages between your fingers are being substituted by technological advances such as e-books and i-pads. Kids are turning to movie versions of books and Wikipedia summaries.

Reading offers so much more than just words. It is a source of knowledge, creative and innovative ideas, gossip and adventure. Children often don’t realise how reading can be purposeful and relevant to their lives. Children should be encouraged from a young age to read for pleasure because as they grow older, they make excuses such as ‘it’s boring’ or it is time consuming or it is just unimportant. It has been found that children, who read more, have a higher level of literacy.

The more common reason however is that people read because of pleasure. Books give you a strange superpower, allowing you to become another person, to inhabit their minds and their bodies and live in a different world, a world of vampires, or witches or wizards or just in a different environment. It enables you to see the world from a new perspective, find the respect for things you never thought of and learn little life lessons on the way. It is the modern yellow brick road, except it doesn’t just take you to oz, but to anywhere, any country, any world, any parallel universe.

Just imagine, if everyone read more, they understand the perspectives of the world, they understand what it means to be survivor of war, to being an indulgent, narcissistic little girl, to being the most powerful man in the world. They understand how it feels to be pressured by families or to be one of the oppressed. If everyone read, perhaps then we will be able to see the Utopia we have so been seeking for because there is a level of understanding and respect between cultures and communities.