
Can Reading Make You Happier? | the New Yorker

A letter from author Anne Lamott on the value of reading:
“If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.
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“If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.
B... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: On the paradox of focus, criticism, and the value of reading
Many of us form profound attachments when we read. Sometimes we attach ourselves to characters, imagining them as our friends or lovers or most profound enemies; sometimes a book’s author draws us, perhaps because of a persona he or she projects, perhaps—especially if we are writers or would-be writers ourselves—because we admire and envy.
Alan Jacobs • The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how different social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical eras – and plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat-out ... See more
Stuart Patience • Tyler Cowen on Reading Fast, Reading Well, and Reading Widely
Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure: associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in young adolescence | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core
Xingming Zhaocambridge.org
Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your
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