Reading is one way we are reminded: stay human.

This personal involvement in creating the meaning of a book naturally engages our reflection and discernment, our critical sense and moral faculties. And, by engaging them, reading also stretches and strengthens them, helping them to develop and expand, to become more responsive, not only more attuned and accurate but also more supple, more flexibl... See more

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your

... See more

Reading across a genres, subjects, and perspectives has the power to pop the filter bubbles that many of us increasingly find ourselves in, both online and off. It’s how we develop a healthy intellectual humility, where no single ideology or belief system monopolises truth.

“So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading.

“Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given.”

—Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet