“A reader lives a thousand lives, said Jojen. A man who never reads lives only once.” – George R. R. Martin. Reading is something that I have always loved. I read books because I like them, not because it’s something I have to do. I am never lonely as long as I have a book by my side and for me at least, there is no trouble than an hour’s reading can’t assuage.

Reading always provides you with knowledge, irrespective of what you read, and allows you to have experiences that you would never be able to have otherwise. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time. You can go riding on a camel in the Arabian desert, into space at warp speed, into the murky world of Intelligence gathering, to Alaska, Antarctica, be transported back in time to the Second World War…...virtually everything you would ever want. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body….it refreshes and rejuvenates it, it stimulates imagination, nurtures creativity…... and helps develop kindness, empathy and sympathy. Books put us into the shoes of other, less fortunate people, make us understand their plight and show us the desperate condition of people living in war-torn countries like Iraq, Syria and others. In short, they make us better human beings……...

Reading is one of the best forms of entertainment. A book sucks you in…….and you often get emotionally attached to the characters. You laugh with them, cheer for them, curse at the bad guys, cry at the death of your favourite character, grieve at a heartbreak…………and when you sense a tragedy in the next few pages…you feel the cold and the darkness falling, you can see the net drawing tight around the characters that live and breathe on the pages………. you want to stop reading but you can’t………...It’s as if you are being dragged behind a carriage and you can neither let go nor change the course……. When I read a book, I put in all the imagination that I can, and it’s as if I am writing the book and reading it at the same time, rather, it’s like I’m living it. But I don’t suppose many people do it really…….and I am sure that you can never enjoy a book completely unless you do that. Every book is full of ideas and it’s our responsibility to find it, think about it and make it truly ours……...

Reading is also a source of great comfort in dark times…. Books are like old friends, and even if you are not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. And they are a part of your history. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life. Books have been written about every conceivable incident in life and what’s great about so many of them, is that you can totally relate to the characters and the situations they face, and you feel that the book might just have been written about you….and maybe this is why, we read and… in moments of darkness, we turn to books, to find words for what we already know…………
Love for reading gives rise to love for creative writing. Reading usually helps me write …. I don’t know how it is with other people, but for me, reading gets the gears turning and the cogs whirring in my head…and produces fantastical ideas, some of which are atrocious, and others quite good…and everyone should exercise that creativity….it doesn’t matter what you write, fiction, nonfiction, whatever…. most of it will be rubbish but that’s how you learn. Personally I feel that the best genre is fantasy…want to write a story about Greek Gods and kings, witches and wizards, dragons and unicorns sure you can…. but of course there are other genres as well. Doing this will also immensely help your grammar. Reading and writing makes you develop an “ear” for sound and language. You automatically know that a word just doesn’t sound right or is not fitting into place, which in turn increases the quality of your writing, allows you to have more grammatically correct and polished conversations with people, impress your boss favourably towards you…….and so on. It’s totally win-win for you, right? However, you must be careful of what you read and write because just like the company you keep, reading too influences your character and behaviour to a great extent……

Reading is something, that if you once fall in love with, you can never leave and I guess the reason why so many people like me spend a large part of their time with their heads buried in books, is because they find the real world so boring and disappointing. It is a form of escape for them from their mostly uninteresting daily existence in a world where friendship, loyalty, courage, honour, respect and mercy don’t matter anymore…… into a realm where dragons and centaurs and unicorns roam the land and where honour matters more than wealth, where a promise once made is always kept and kindness and justice prevails……. But I have been guilty of falling out of touch with books recently. I guess, Counter Strike Global Offensive is to blame…… I almost never can think of sitting down and reading a book instead of having a fun time trolling people in matchmaking. But I now realize that in doing so I am missing out on what used to be my favourite thing to do……and I have resolved that from this point on, I’ll start again. In fact, I have already made a summer reading list, and am currently busy procuring the books I want to read……….and yes, I read physical books, not on a Kindle. It’s not as if I have anything against the Kindle, but I feel that some things are better without technology………I love the smell of fresh pages in a book, the feel, the sound when I turn the pages………I love everything about books.

And I am glad that I have done so because I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on…What I loved to do is to lie down on my bed with a book in my hand and several others stacked on top of each other on my bedside table…. to ensure that the happy bubble I was in didn’t pop until the small hours of the morning. A book opened……I fell in, and slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporated, and I was alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world and something I mean to experience more of………….Peace!