When asked to say something about the value of reading, my first thought was to find out what others had said about it, in order to extend my own experience and compare it with theirs. (No easier or more convenient way to do that than by reading!) I found that Socrates, for example, advised people to employ their time in improving themselves through reading "so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for."

That's good advice. Reading expands and multiplies our own capacities for thinking, and it puts us in contact with a variety of perspectives beyond the reach of the richest possible individual life experience. And, when the constraints of time and place disappear, the quality of the minds you can encounter is amazing. "In the best books, great men [and great women, too!] talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts." -William Ellery Channing. Egypt and Plato, Paris and Einstein, are just a page away. Cynthia Heimel says it best: "Reading is a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book."

But the ease of intellectual expansion through reading is not, in my opinion, its main attraction. According to many thoughtful sources, reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. The process of engaging oneself in a serious book is like engaging the world. The struggle to understand a book, to comprehend how the different parts work together into something more than the sum of its parts, is a valuable exercise-and in fact, the meaning of a good book exceeds the sum of its parts as much as the meaning of a sentence exceeds the bare sense of the separate words in it. Moreover, I believe that the struggle to comprehend a complex text in this way is not just analogous to our struggle to make sense of our experience; it is the same struggle. It uses the same mental muscles and the same techniques. And it yields the same result: meaning.

I like Aldous Huxley's claim that "everyone who knows how to read has it in her power to magnify herself, to multiply the ways in which she exists, to make her life full, significant, and interesting." I agree with William Styron that reading is a great way "to keep absolute loneliness at bay." And beyond that, I believe that reading affords some of the greatest pleasures in life, pleasures that are available in no other way.