How Reading Changed My Life

This sense of women reading, reading, always reading, was in fact reinforced by what I read […] There are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers. Actually, there are far fewer coming-of-age books for boys in general, and most are unabashed action stories: raft rides, pirate ships, and battlefields. By contrast, friendship and reading are the central themes of much of the best-loved literature for girls.
When I was younger, I figured that this was because we women had so little to do in the world that the closest we would ever come to real life was to read about it. In fact, that’s probably why I loved reading so myself; part of my dissatisfaction with my life was clearly, in retrospect, a dissatisfaction with the traditional roles available to me as a girl at the time, neither of which—nun or housewife, take your pick—particularly suited my temperament.
But it may also be true that the psychology of women lends itself to a keen interest in the vicarious experience of life.

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. […] There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality […] Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

[…] it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one […] were more real than the real people I knew. My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.