the book i like to read essay

Reading Ladies

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July 6, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Reasons Why I Love Reading

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I’m linking up today with That Artsy Reader Girl: Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Reasons Why I Love Reading.

Why do YOU love to read?

The most simple reason I love reading is that I’m a lifelong reader and have always loved the world of words. I’m the kid who read the cereal box with my breakfast in the morning.

People who love reading and are lifelong readers, usually love it for several of the same reasons. I suppose that many readers could make a similar list. I’m joining in with other TTT list makers today to celebrate the love of reading. Which reason would top your list? Do you have other reasons why you love reading?

I Love Reading….

To experience different lives/times/cultures.

One of the most significant benefits of reading is transporting yourself to different time periods and experiencing different cultures. I often wonder how I would have lived my life during various times and circumstances. Reading improves the imagination.

To Develop Understanding and Compassion

Reading enhances compassion for others as we see life from other perspectives.

To Increase My Knowledge

I love historical fiction because I am continuing my education. Hazards of reading histfic include falling down Google rabbit holes as I am enticed to research different people, time periods, and events. Reading makes you smarter.

I wonder how non-readers survived the pandemic? Although my reading tastes gravitated toward lighter, happier reads during the pandemic, I could always turn off the news and escape into books. Days under lockdown never felt too bleak as I leaped into different imaginary worlds! Reading provides armchair travel and gives you places to go when you have to stay home.

To Experience “Book People Are the Best People”

Have you ever seen someone reading in a coffee shop or on a train and knew that you could be friends with that person because he/she was reading a book? Readers attract other readers and are the most interesting and thoughtful conversationalists! In addition, through blogging I have discovered the fabulous international book blogging community! Reading brings people together.

To Be a Good Conversationalist

One of my favorite conversation starters is “What are you reading?” or “What is your favorite book so far this year?” or “Do you have a favorite literary character?” or “Do you have a favorite author or genre?” Talking about books gives people opportunities to discuss a variety of important and meaningful topics.

I’ve initiated books conversations with and gifted books to my doctor (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek), my dentist (Project Hail Mary), my dental hygienist (Summer Romance), my hair stylist (a variety of histfic/women’s fiction), and my retina specialist (And There Was Light). Of course, I also regularly gift books to my friends, my mom, and my family.

I’m always flummoxed when the answer is “I don’t read.” Hummmm……. At that point, I ask the person to recall a time in their life when they did enjoy a book. Just recently my grandson, who is not a huge reader, told me that the only book he really ever enjoyed reading was Wild Robot. I think that’s great that he has identified one book that has given him a fond reading memory. I believe people who don’t read just haven’t found the right book yet, so my brain begins whirling with recommendations that would hook them.

To Endure Waiting

Actually, I look forward to waiting rooms! Even a long checkout line is a reading opportunity (if you carry your library with you in your pocket via the Kindle app). A thirty-minute wait in the school pick-up line becomes an excellent reading occasion! Even traffic can be a blessing if you are listening to an audiobook!

To Never Experience Boredom

Nothing on TV? No problem when you’ve got a book. All your friends are busy and you don’t have plans? No problem when you can read. Is it raining all weekend or you’re enduring an unprecedented heatwave or you’re under a hurricane or tornado warning and your outdoor plans have been canceled? Books to the rescue. Children need entertainment? Read a book together and then watch the movie. Books can be your best friend.

To Enjoy Inexpensive Entertainment

Books can be expensive, but there are ways to read on the cheap. Libraries, thrift stores, yard sales, Little Free Libraries, swapping with friends, watching for Kindle deals, asking publishers for ARCs, and Amazon gift cards for birthdays are all ways to cut down on book buying expenses. Last year I read 131 books: over 50% were from the library and another 30% were ARCs…..I bought only a small percentage of books last year and those were almost all on sale. A night at the movies or dinner in a restaurant will likely cost more than a book purchase.

To Give Book Recommendations

As a reader, I always have book recommendations! I love being able to find just the right book for a gift or make a perfect recommendation!

What’s your number one reason why you love reading?

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42 comments.

It’s fun and a great escape. I like your reasons. http://www.rsrue.blogspot.com

Thanks for commenting!

All of the above! I watch Kindle deals and GoodReads giveaways like it was my job LOL. I also like reading because it’s been a habit since I was nine years old. It’s been a constant in my life. How many hobbies can you say that you can grow with throughout the years?

Yes, reading is a wonderful lifelong hobby!

I agree with all of these, but I particularly love #6. I think being someone who is well known for being a reader makes me more accessible. Even people who don’t read know they can always start a conversation with me by asking, “What are you reading?” or “What’s the best book you’ve read this year?” I love it when people, especially non-readers, make that effort. Of course, I have longer conversations with those who actually read, but still…

Susan http://www.blogginboutbooks.com

Oh that’s a great insight Susan! Thanks for sharing!

Experiencing different cultures and lives is one of the best parts of reading, I think.

My post: https://lydiaschoch.com/top-ten-tuesday-reasons-why-i-love-reading/

I think so, too Lydia! Hoping over now to read your post!

I love your answers Carol. I just commented on another post about the people I have met when I am in Florida because they are reading and I stop and talk to them about their book. Some of them are there every year and we have become good friends. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t read, it is unfathomable.

Right?! What do people do who don’t read?! And reading is a great way to make friends! 🙌 virtually and IRL!

I’ve always being a reader. It gives me the opportunity to live different lives and be different characters I can’t be in real life. It’s the perfect excuse to not attend some programs I find boring with friends. It keeps my company and I am never bored. I don’t know if it’s just me but reading in the library gives me headache, hence am better off alone outside the library. I feel like it makes me productive. And when I meet people I can discuss the books I read with, that’s the best moments of my life. I am creating a group on WhatsApp where I can review/ discuss books with my friends. You can’t get into trouble reading books.

Escapism at its best! And you’re right, you can’t get into trouble! 🙌😂

I have always loved reading as well. There was a time when I was working full-time and attending college when I didn’t have time to read what I wanted to read and I remember longing for the time when I could read what I wanted to read.

I read for all of the same reasons you do, but I think my number one reason is that I am fully relaxed when I am reading. I realized this when going through a particularly difficult season. Like you Carol, I can’t imagine how people who don’t read deal with difficult times.

Thanks for sharing Gretchen! Reading does have its seasons. And yes I love how reading takes us away!

A great collection of reasons!

Here is my TTT post: https://readbakecreate.com/?p=468

Thanks for commenting! Hopping over now to read your post!

I agree with you. “Book people” are pretty cool! Here’s my list!

Thanks for commenting Lectrice! I’m hopping over now to read your post.

All of these responses resonated with me Carol, especially learning new things and escaping. I also use our local library and the apps available, so I’m not spending too much money on my reading addiction. I also agree with Gretchen above, I am at my most relaxed when reading a book. I can block out the world around me and just be in the book. That’s why I find audio books a bit hard at times, I am always doing something like driving or walking while listening to them and I can’t get the pictures from the words like I can when I read the words myself – if that makes sense! Great list!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Deb! I struggle with audio, too. I need to see the words!

I’m glad I’m not the only one to do so Carol. I keep persevering with it though.

I could relate to all of these. Making a decision a few years ago to read more books from authors around the world has given me far more insight into different cultures. Your number 6 reason is an good one. I’ve used books and reading as ice breakers when visiting colleagues in different countries : asking someone what books they would recommend from their country helped break down reservations.

Book questions make great conversation starters!

Brilliant reasons. We all share a lot of them.

Thanks Marianne! I’m hopping over now to read your post!

All great reasons! Never being bored, for sure — there’s no excuse for having nothing to do! (And I never understand how people can sit on an airplane for hours without a book in their hands… I think I would be looking for an exit and a parachute if I couldn’t read on planes!) My TTT

I think the same about people who sit on planes and in waiting rooms without reading! Hopping over now to read your post.

10 wonderful reasons for reading Carol. Plus, look at all the ‘friends’ we get to make and chat with that we would never have otherwise met! ❤📚

Bookish friends from around the world are the best! 🙌😍📚

Great post! I’m in it for the escapism and new ideas mostly

Can’t argue with that! 😍🙌

#1 is escape! And I truly love learning anything!

Yay for escape! We needed it in 2020!

[…] no interest in Mercy Thompson) 13 books perfectly summed up with one-liners from Gilmore Girls. 10 Reasons Why I Love Reading—Reading Ladies Book Club had a good entry for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt. How Book […]

Thanks for the shout out! 🙌😍

Reading is purely about escapism for me. I want to live in a completely made up world.

Love to escape! 😍🙌

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Thanks for linking to my post! 😋

I really liked it. I wanted to leave a note. I was reading your website. I also tried to share the site.

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Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Our today’s session is going to be focused on writing short essays on the topic of ‘The Book I Like The Most.’ There will be three sets of short essays on the same topic covering different word limits.

Feature image of Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 100 Words

Out of all the books that I have read, the one I like the most is Ramayana. Ramayana is a Hindu epic that tells the story of Lord Rama. The story starts with Rama’s father, Dasharatha, who was the King of Ayodhya and his three wives. Later Lord Rama is born and the story follows him as he grows up, gets married, is exiled and has to fight various demons and evil creatures.

The main part of the story is where Lord Rama fights the Demon King, Ravana and defeats him. He then returns to his kingdom and rules over the people as a moral and just ruler. This sacred epic written in ancient times teaches us a lot about life.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 200 Words

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about the outside world and improve our intellect. I love to read books. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. I have read many fictional and non-fictional books, but the book I like the most is our former president, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s autobiography, ‘Wings of fire’. The book covers his life story before he became the president of India.

In the book, Dr Kalam talks about his childhood, his early life, his family and the struggles they had to go through to make ends meet. He talks about his journey from being a small village boy in Tamil Nadu to becoming a leading scientist in Indian space research, nuclear and missile development programs.

His story is indeed inspiring and proves that one can achieve all their dreams if one is sincere and are determined to work hard and persevere. The book also highlights the importance of family in the life of a person and how their support can help one realize even their seemingly impossible dreams.

I have read the book multiple times and it has always left me feeling motivated and filled with determination to chase my dreams. It is indeed an amazing book.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 400 Words

Books are often referred to as a man’s best friend. They are loyal companions capable of uplifting our moods and providing us with a safe space. Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and information and have helped us evolve in many ways.

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about almost everything and improve our intellect. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. That is why children are always encouraged to read from a young age.

I love to read books and I grew up reading a variety of books, some fiction and others non-fictional. Fairy tales were my favourite. Reading about the different types of fairies, fairy godmothers, kind princesses, evil queens, witches and wizards was magical in itself. I also liked to read mythological books and found the tales from Greek and Roman mythologies pretty interesting.

As I grew up, my interest shifted to non-fictional books like biographies and autobiographies of famous people as well as memoirs and scientific journals. However, throughout the years, there is one series of books that has remained my favourite and that is the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

When I was eight years old, I received the first book of the Harry Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone’, as a birthday present from my aunt. I was delighted. That book introduced me to a whole new world – a world full of magical beings. As I read the book, my mind conjured up images of what that world might look like and my imagination exploded.

The book made me feel a range of emotions. I cried reading about Harry’s suffering. I smiled when Hagrid saved Harry. I felt so happy when Harry, Ron and Hermione became friends and I sat there holding my breath as the end approached.

After I finished the first book, I couldn’t wait to buy the following ones. However, even to this day, the first book holds a special place in my heart. Harry Potter books introduced us to the wizarding world and its workings. They taught us about friendship, about having fun as well as working hard. They also taught us that no matter how strong the evil force is, the good always wins in the end.

I also have many other books that I like. Some of them are ‘Wings of fire’ and ‘Ignited minds’ by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, ‘Gitanjali’ by Rabindranath Tagore, “To kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte.

I have adopted a very simplistic approach to writing these essays for a better understanding of all kinds of students. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, post them in the comment section below. Join our Telegram channel to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us,

25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

A list of twenty-five of the greatest free nonfiction essays from contemporary and classic authors that you can read online.

Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot, I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

The Most Popular Book Club Books of August, According to Goodreads

Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas

As a writer, you love to read and talk to others about reading books. Check out some examples of essays about reading and topic ideas for your essay.

Many people fall in love with good books at an early age, as experiencing the joy of reading can help transport a child’s imagination to new places. Reading isn’t just for fun, of course—the importance of reading has been shown time and again in educational research studies.

If you love to sit down with a good book, you likely want to share your love of reading with others. Reading can offer a new perspective and transport readers to different worlds, whether you’re into autobiographies, books about positive thinking, or stories that share life lessons.

When explaining your love of reading to others, it’s important to let your passion shine through in your writing. Try not to take a negative view of people who don’t enjoy reading, as reading and writing skills are tougher for some people than others.

Talk about the positive effects of reading and how it’s positively benefitted your life. Offer helpful tips on how people can learn to enjoy reading, even if it’s something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. Remember, your goal when writing essays about reading is to make others interested in exploring the world of books as a source of knowledge and entertainment.

Now, let’s explore some popular essays on reading to help get you inspired and some topics that you can use as a starting point for your essay about how books have positively impacted your life.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers

Examples Of Essays About Reading

1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times
2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan
3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

4. How ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ Saved Me By Isaac Fitzgerald

5. catcher in the rye: that time a banned book changed my life by pat kelly, topic ideas for essays about reading, 1. how can a high school student improve their reading skills, 2. what’s the best piece of literature ever written, 3. how reading books from authors of varied backgrounds can provide a different perspective, 4. challenging your point of view: how reading essays you disagree with can provide a new perspective.

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1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times

“My error the first time around was to read “Middlemarch” as one would a typical novel. But “Middlemarch” isn’t really about plot and dialogue. It’s all about character, as mediated through the wise and compassionate (but sharply astute) voice of the omniscient narrator. The book shows us that we cannot live without other people and that we cannot live with other people unless we recognize their flaws and foibles in ourselves.” The New York Times

In this collection of reader essays, people share the books that have shaped how they see the world and live their lives. Talking about a life-changing piece of literature can offer a new perspective to people who tend to shy away from reading and can encourage others to pick up your favorite book.

2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan

“Consistent reading helps you develop your analytical thinking skills over time. It stimulates your brain and allows you to think in new ways. When you are actively engaged in what you’re reading, you would be able to ask better questions, look at things from a different perspective, identify patterns and make connections.” Anangsha Alammyan

Alammyan shares how she got away from habits that weren’t serving her life (such as scrolling on social media) and instead turned her attention to focus on reading. She shares how she changed her schedule and time management processes to allow herself to devote more time to reading, and she also shares the many ways that she benefited from spending more time on her Kindle and less time on her phone.

3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

“When my learning specialist convinced me that I was an intelligent person with a reading disorder, I gradually stopped hiding from what I was most afraid of—the belief that I was a person of mediocre intelligence with overambitious goals for herself. As I slowly let go of this fear, I became much more aware of my learning issues. For the first time, I felt that I could dig below the surface of my unhappiness in school without being ashamed of what I might find.” Blair Kenney

Reading does not come easily to everyone, and dyslexia can make it especially difficult for a person to process words. In this essay, Kenney shares her experience of being diagnosed with dyslexia during her sophomore year of college at Yale. She gave herself more patience, grew in her confidence, and developed techniques that worked to improve her reading and processing skills.

“I took that book home to finish reading it. I’d sit somewhat uncomfortably in a tree or against a stone wall or, more often than not, in my sparsely decorated bedroom with the door closed as my mother had hushed arguments with my father on the phone. There were many things in the book that went over my head during my first time reading it. But a land left with neither Rhyme nor Reason, as I listened to my parents fight, that I understood.” Isaac Fitzgerald

Books can transport a reader to another world. In this essay, Fitzgerald explains how Norton Juster’s novel allowed him to escape a difficult time in his childhood through the magic of his imagination. Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts.

“From the first paragraph my mind was blown wide open. It not only changed my whole perspective on what literature could be, it changed the way I looked at myself in relation to the world. This was heavy stuff. Of the countless books I had read up to this point, even the ones written in first person, none of them felt like they were speaking directly to me. Not really anyway.” Pat Kelly

Many readers have had the experience of feeling like a book was written specifically for them, and in this essay, Kelly shares that experience with J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel. Writing about a book that felt like it was written specifically for you can give you the chance to share what was happening in your life when you read the book and the lasting impact that the book had on you as a person.

There are several topic options to choose from when you’re writing about reading. You may want to write about how literature you love has changed your life or how others can develop their reading skills to derive similar pleasure from reading.

Middle and high school students who struggle with reading can feel discouraged when, despite their best efforts, their skills do not improve. Research the latest educational techniques for boosting reading skills in high school students (the research often changes) and offer concrete tips (such as using active reading skills) to help students grow.

It’s an excellent persuasive essay topic; it’s fun to write about the piece of literature you believe to be the greatest of all time. Of course, much of this topic is a matter of opinion, and it’s impossible to prove that one piece of literature is “better” than another. Write your essay about how the piece of literature you consider the best positive affected your life and discuss how it’s impacted the world of literature in general.

The world is full of many perspectives and points of view, and it can be hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Reading books by authors of different gender, race, or socioeconomic status can help open your eyes to the challenges and issues others face. Explain how reading books by authors with different backgrounds has changed your worldview in your essay.

It’s fun to read the information that reinforces viewpoints that you already have, but doing so doesn’t contribute to expanding your mind and helping you see the world from a different perspective. Explain how pushing oneself to see a different point of view can help you better understand your perspective and help open your eyes to ideas you may not have considered.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think. –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.” –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum , Dazed & Confused , and Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) · Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016) · Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) · Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Romance, Historical, Contemporary, Paranormal, Young Adult, Book reviews, industry news, and commentary from a reader's point of view

ESSAY: Why I Love to Read and to Write by Gail Dayton

Last winter, I posted that I would love to hear from readers, writers, bloggers about why they read, write and blog. Gail Dayton, author of the new book, New Blood , offers up this personal account.

I love to read. No, I looooove to read. And I read fast. I read about 300 books a year (counting re-reads). So when I saw the Ja(y)nes offer to post essays on reading, writing and the love thereof, I got to thinking-‘WHY do I love reading and writing so much.

It’s the stories. My cousin Diane taught me to read when I was just four, and from that moment, I’ve been caught up in the worlds opened up to me by books. But I think my addiction to story must go earlier than that, because my mother likes to talk about taking me to see Bambi with my multitude of cousins when I was three. (Mama is the youngest of four sisters, each of whom had four kids, except for Aunt Bettye, who had six…The family Thanksgiving is massive.) For weeks afterward, my invisible friend Bambi went everywhere with me. Hey, at least Bambi was a deer and didn’t require his own plate at the dinner table, like the fella’s invisible friend Mister. (Mister got on a plane one day and flew to Chicago, never to be seen again.)

Stories fire my imagination and, for a little while, let me live in That world, instead of this-‘often boring-‘one. In the world of story, ANYTHING can happen.

Which is why I write. I still have invisible friends. No, really. TIME magazine quoted researchers who discovered that fiction writers’ relationships with their characters is virtually identical with a child’s relationship with his invisible friends. We know they’re not real. Honest. We do know. But we still have no control over them. They go off and do stuff just because they want to, and we have no way to stop them.

Back to the topic. I don’t write just because I get to hang out with invisible friends. I write because I get to tell stories. And in those stories, ANYTHING can happen. Dragons are real. Soul mates can find their destiny. People can recover from tragedy. Even all of the above. And, despite the fact that characters can go their own way, I can still tell the story I want to tell. (The characters usually know better than I do.)

I started wanting to tell stories MY way back in-‘junior high, I think. That’s when I inherited a bunch of my dad’s old books. Copies of Robin Hood in archaic English. The original Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I literally read the cover off Tarzan . The only problem I saw was that Tarzan didn’t have a sister. Jane really didn’t cut it as a place-holder for the role I wanted to play in the book. I wanted to live in the jungle too. So I made up one.

I graduated from fan fiction sometime in college, eventually learned to finish a book, and here I am. I still love to read, and I still love to write (even though these days it sometimes can feel like work). Because it’s all about the story.

If you would like to contribute a guest essay on why you read, why you write or why you blog, please send an email to Jane at dearauthor.com with “Essay” in the subject line.

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Writingskills

6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’

A Book I Have Recently Read: Books are the best resources of people. With which no earthly wealth can be compared. By reading books we can keep our mind healthy and happy. A good book opens the eyes of the human mind as well as expands and develops the knowledge and intellect and helps to light the mind. Many people like to read story books or other kinds of books. Reading books is a good habit. ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’ is an important paragraph for the students. In this post I have presented 6 paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’.

A Book I Have Recently Read

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read a book named “ Pather Panchali “. It was written by famous writer Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay. The novel is about a little village boy named Apu. The main characters of the book are Apu, Durga, Harihar and Sarbajaya. Harihar and Sarbajaya, a rustic couple, spent their days in miserable distress. But they dreamt of a rosy future. Apu and Durga are their children. Durga died a premature death. It was a great shock to the family. One cannot shed tears when one reads about the death of Apu’s dearest sister Durga. The novel gives us a very living picture of the beauty of a remote village in Bengal. The story reminds us of the hardship of the thousands of poor and helpless people of our country. Really it is an immortal creation of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

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I have little time to read books other than school books. But l heard the story of “Ramer Sumati” written by Saratchandra Chattapadhyay from my grandpa. The story charmed me very much. Recently I managed to have a copy of the book which I finished in a single sitting. It is entirely the story of a joint family of rural Bengal. Here are a few principal characters – Ramlal, the hero, Shyamlal, his step-brother and Narayani, the wife of Shyamlal. Apart from them there are Shyamla’s son and Digambari, his mother-in-law. Ramlal lost his mother when he was only two and a half years old. Narayani, the sister-in-law brought him up with all motherly love and affection. Digambari could not tolerate the sweet relationship between the two. Ramlal was very wayward and that was at the root of all problems. The ancestral home was partitioned and Ramlal was separated much to the pain of Narayani. The author’s portrayal of the characters of Ramlal and Narayani is simply unique. Details of the book cannot be given in this short span. But everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

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I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. I am a big fan of cricket as well. My father recently gifted me the autobiography of Sachin Tendulkar “Sachin Tendulkar – Playing It My Way” on my birthday. The book is really very interesting. Sachin Tendulkar is not only a great player but also has become an icon. So a chance to peek into the life of such an icon is always sought after. The chapters describe all the important events of his life. The reader is bound to respect the legend more after going through the book. The book not only brings out Sachin’s passion for cricket but also reveals how caring a father and gentle son he is. I will cherish the experience of reading the book forever and this will be a guide force in my life. I wish to read it once again in future.

A Book I Have Recently Read

Miranda in “The Tempest”

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. It is the last play of the great playwright, which was written in 1611 at Stafford. Prospero was a learned man. He did not like to rule Milan as merely a Duke. His power was his wisdom. His brother, Antonio, took advantage of this craving for knowledge and conspired to drive him away from Milan with the help of the king of Naples, Alonoso.

Prospero and his daughter eventually took shelter in an alien island. It was a mystic land of which Prospero was little aware. Caliban was an evil spirit which was living in that island. Gradually, Prospero dominated Caliban and became a supreme power by way of his white magic. Dr. Faustus of Marlowe exercised necromancy, but Prospero used his magic for the welfare of the world. Hence his magic was a boon not a bane. His daughter, Miranda, was a lovable and beautiful young lady. Caliban wanted to seduce Miranda, but in vain. At last Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, came to the mysterious land. Miranda was very much appalled to see a beautiful young man for the first time. Seeing Ferdinand, she cried out, “O brave new world.” Later Miranda and Ferdinand fell in love. Prospero wanted to test Ferdinand’s devotion to his daughter. Ferdinand won the mind of Prospero. Using his white magic, Prospero taught everyone including his brother good lessons. Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian realized their misdeed. Gonzalo, who helped Prospero once to escape from his cruel brother, was rewarded.

Finally, everyone was reconciled. Prospero returned to Milan with his daughter and he freed Ariel, the spirit which helped Prospero in fulfilling his desires while living in the alien island. The happy reunion of the play implies the fact that Prospero is a major figure who by way of using his white magic helps everyone reconcile in spite of shortcomings. Honesty and goodness have been rewarded. I felt much aesthetic pleasure while reading the play. Shakespeare’s language, his style, above all, his blending of tragedy and comedy gave to my mind a soothing effect which I cannot forget ever.

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Recently I have read Bibhutibhushan’s classic novel ‘Chander Pahar’. I loved the book so much that I have lost count of the number of times I flipped through the book even after I had finished reading it.

The book ‘Chander Pahar’ records the adventures of Shankar, the main character of the novel. Shankar, a young bengali boy, faces many adventures in Africa where he goes in connection with his job on the railways. He encounters many ferocious animals like lions, black mamba etc. But the real adventure begins when Shankar accompanies Diago Alverage, a European adventurer, to the Kilimanjaro mountain in search of diamonds. In the course of the events Diago gets killed by a terrible animal called ‘Buniyp’ and Shankar is left all alone in that unknown land of adversity and danger. But he braves it with extraordinary courage and valour.

After a great struggle, he is saved from the desert. Shankar is the embodiment of courage. I love the character very much. I am attracted by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s great narrative skill. He makes the description of African jungles and Shankar’s adventures alive with his narrative skill. Author’s creativity makes Shankar’s character one of the most popular characters of Bengali literature. Whenever I read the novel, I find myself engrossed in it. My mind also travels with Shankar in the land of Africa and feels the adventure. This is why ‘Chander Pahar’ holds such a special place in my mind.

‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Of all the books I have read, I like ‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller the most. The episode centres round the hard struggle of life of Helen Keller. She writes with a natural ease and power, hardly equaled by any other writer of that category. In this book we see that Helen Keller became blind and deaf after a serious illness in her childhood. However, the day when Miss Sullivan came to her as her teacher was the most memorable day in her life. After a long hard process Helen learnt to read, in raised letters in Braille method . She learnt to write also in a special type of typewriter. In the book ‘The Story of My Life’ an account of the first twenty two years of Helen Keller’s life has been given. During this time she came into contact with many noble and affectionate persons. In her autobiography Helen describes her experiences with so much ease and sincerity in such a lucid style that it cannot but arouse love and wonder for her. But the most striking feature of this book is her strong will and iron determination to cross all the hurdles of a handicapped person in her own life. And therefore, it has the universal appeal to all the readers throughout the world. Everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

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8 thoughts on “6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’”

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Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

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Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

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Essay on The Most Interesting book I read

Our school library is having books which I like very much. One of my friends showed me a certain book in the library and he said that is his favorite book. He also said that is was the second part of the most famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain.

I borrowed the book from the librarian on the advice of my friend. When I went home that day, I had an immediate lunch, when to my room and started reading the book.

Home interesting was it! It was a wonderful book. The book was full of adventures. The main character was Huckleberry Finn who was a poor English boy whose father was a third class drunkard. This father wanted to get his son’s fortune which he get previously in yet another adventure with Tom Sawyer, his friend. So Finn runs away from the custody of his father and meet another boy. This boy was Jim who had been running away from master. He had been a slave boy.

The two friends go to the sea and get on to a ship. They become friendly with the seamen and go on fishing. They also go to various island in the sea and engage themselves in many adventures. At last they come home. Finn finds that his father had died and hi was no more in danger. Jim also get his freedom with Finn’s help.

This interesting children’s novel had been written by well-known English Author Mark Twain who had previously written the famous book Tom Sawyer. Both these books are popular even today. So many millions of children throughout the English speaking world must have read these books. Much more than Tom Sawyer, it was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was the most interesting book I have ever read.

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Turning to essays, Edwidge Danticat makes shrewd use of the form

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Book Review

We're Alone: Essays

By Edwidge Danticat Graywolf: 192 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Essay collections appear infrequently on the lists of most popular nonfiction — memoirs and historical narratives dominate conversations about the genre. Those forms of nonfiction are wonderful in their own ways. They are also the versions that are closest to fiction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can exclude the unique offerings of the essay.

An essay collection presents a compressed reading experience, sometimes poetic, and often requiring the author to demonstrate the act of forming an opinion. In its most exalted form, the essay collection is about many things at once. Its goal is not to share information about a topic but to dramatize the formation of a perspective, the development of an informed point of view — a focus that makes the form much more dependent on the writer than the subject matter. “We’re Alone,” a collection of eight short essays by the celebrated Haitian American novelist and short story writer Edwidge Danticat, exemplifies that achievement.

Readers who have appreciated other voice-driven essay collections, such as Zadie Smith’s pandemic-inspired “Intimations,” Erica Caldwell’s “Wrong Is Not My Name,” Jordan Kisner’s “Thin Places,” Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings” or Elissa Gabbert’s “ The Unreality of Memory ,” will find something familiar with Danticat in “We’re Alone.” The thematic thread of this collection binds loosely around experiences of disconnection or isolation that are exacerbated by a sense of risk predicated on racial, political or social vulnerability. In the essay “A Rainbow in the Sky,” Danticat writes: “The less stable your house, the more terror you feel.” She has elegantly captured that those who face a storm with all foundations intact have a different relationship to the experience than those who were already struggling before it.

In the preface to the book, Danticat discloses that writing essays allows her to feel alone with herself and present with a reader. These pieces represent her outstretched hand, an invitation to spend shared time in reflection. Danticat took the book’s title from the French poem “Plage” by the Haitian writer Roland Chassagne, whose tragic history of imprisonment is also explored in the book. His poem envisions a night spent under palm trees, and the longing for the end of a deep disappointment. Here Danticat finds an early foothold into one of the book’s chief concerns: thresholds where someone’s feelings have been constricted for the sake of other people’s comfort. The title also invokes a plural self, a collective that shares in the writer’s experience of solitude and disaffection.

In the literary essay, a tradition that unites personal insight with anecdotes, evidence and reasoning, one of the most satisfying moments is finding where the writer’s logic breaks and she struggles to fully accommodate the proportions of her subject. Such moments make the inquiries appear vulnerable and honest, even when in reality they are simulations of sense-making. Not all essayists are invested in showing their struggle in understanding or are given the space to do so. But Danticat invites readers into the challenge of putting facts and feelings together. She excels at showing how hard it is to know what the right questions are to ask or how to answer them, and like many of us, she struggles to talk about difficult subjects, especially with her children.

For example, in “By the Time You Read This…,” Danticat debates how much and when to tell her children about how police violence affects the way Black people and immigrants think about safety. She writes, “Each time a young Black person is killed by a police officer or by a vigilante civilian, I ask myself if the time had come for me to write to my daughters a letter about Abner Louima and the long list of nonsurvivors who have come after him.” There is dignity in her doubt, which makes way for the kind of compassion that characterizes these essays.

Danticat’s insights are informed by accounts of the trials of friends and family: Her beloved mother wanders off in an airport; an uncle suffers from an irresolvable, progressive disorientation; Louima, a family friend, is attacked and raped by police; and two mentors, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall, live through their final months. These experiences emphasize the possibility of loss and disconnection, reflecting a kind of hypervigilance that can be an inheritance of trauma. She approaches these accounts with the courage of an intentional witness, maintaining that perspective even when she looks beyond her own circle. In “Chronicles of a Death Foretold,” Danticat tells the story of a self-proclaimed prophetess who predicted the 2021 assassination of the Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, and the collection’s penultimate essay, “Wozo, Not Mawozo,” examines the weeks following the kidnapping of Christian missionaries in Haiti in 2021.

These are clearly the essays of an accomplished novelist. They move swiftly through detailed anecdotes and varied landscapes, even when the principal action the speaker engages in is “thinking.” There is room in an essay for dramatic action, for the expression of the body as it relates to thought, which was somewhat lacking here. At times, I struggled to see the author as a figure in the dramatic action she cited. Even so, it’s a testament to Danticat’s skill that these brief, intense works about serious matters do not feel heavy. She brings us close enough to the trouble at hand that we cannot mistake what we have seen.

But we are not alone in trying to make sense of feelings that come from becoming a witness to this world. No one is.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of the prose collection “Multiply/Divide” and an associate professor of nonfiction at Columbia University.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Reading Books — The Benefits of Growing up and Reading Books

The Benefits of Growing Up and Reading Books

Categories: Personal Life Reading Books

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Words: 911 |

Published: Aug 14, 2018

Words: 911 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Read and grow: my literary journey.

Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., & de Jong, M. T. (2009). Interactive book reading in early education: A tool to stimulate print knowledge as well as oral language. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 979-1007.
Morrison, F. J., & Griffith, E. M. (2019). Building attention, memory, and early reading skills through interactive shared book reading. In Shared Book Reading (pp. 167-190). Routledge.
Krashen, S. D. (2004). The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
McQuillan, J., & Krashen, S. (2008). Explaining the Flynn effect. Reading Psychology, 29(2), 135-142.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Five Books for People Who Really Love Books

These five titles focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.

My dad likes to fish, and he likes to read books about fishing. My mom is a birder; she reads about birds. There are plenty of books on both subjects, I’ve found, when browsing in a gift-giving mood. These presents don’t just prove I’m familiar with their interests. They’re a way to acknowledge that we read about our pastimes to affirm our identity: Fly-fishers are contemplative sorts who reflect on reflections; birders must cultivate stillness and attention. What we choose to read can be a way of saying: I am this kind of soul.

For my part, I like reading more than I like almost anything else. And so, in the manner of my parents, I like to read books about books . Writers who write about writing, readers who write about reading—these are people I instantly recognize as my kind. We’re people who are always in the middle of a chapter, who start conversations by asking, “What are you reading right now?” For us, a meta-book is like coffee brewed with more coffee. It’s extra-strength literature.

If you really love books, or you want to love them more, I have five recommendations. None of these are traditional literary criticism; they’re not dry or academic. They take all kinds of forms (essay, novel, memoir) and focus on the many connections we can form with what we read. Those relationships might be passionate, obsessive, even borderline inappropriate—and this is what makes the books so lovable. Finishing them will make you want to pick up an old favorite or add several more titles to your to-read list.

U and I , by Nicholson Baker

I can now say that I’ve been reading Baker for more than 20 years, or more than half my life. But I didn’t know that would happen when I found U and I in a college friend’s car, borrowed it, and never returned it. The subject, not the author, appealed to me then—I loved John Updike. And so did Baker, though love is probably not the right word. This book-length essay is not quite, or not merely, an appreciation of Updike; it’s a hilarious confessional “true story” of Baker’s anxieties, ambitions, competitive jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy in the face of Updike’s abundant body of work. It’s rich too, with wonderful observations on reading and writing in general, as in a passage considering how much more affecting a memoir becomes once the author is deceased: “The living are ‘just’ writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives , wow wow wow.”

A poem by John Updike: 'Half Moon, Small Cloud'

Dayswork , by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I almost prefer to keep certain books on my to-read list forever, where they remain full of magical possibility and cannot disappoint me. Moby-Dick is one of them. What if, God forbid, I chance to read it at the wrong time or in the wrong place and it doesn’t change my life? So I turn to Dayswork instead, which feels like cheating—you get some of the experience of reading Moby-Dick without any of the risk. This very novel novel, written collaboratively by a novelist and a poet who happen to be married, is sort of a sneaky biography of Herman Melville, framed by a meta-narrative about a woman writing a book during lockdown. This narrator delivers a parade of delightful facts and quotes and anecdotes, which she’s been collecting on sticky notes. You could think of it also as a biography of Melville’s most famous novel, which has had its own life after his death and touched so many other lives. Dayswork is fragmentary, digressive, and completely absorbing.

Read: The endless depths of Moby-Dick symbolism

Written Lives , by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Marías is one of my favorite novelists, but I only recently encountered this work, a collection of short, dubiously nonfictional biographies in a very specific style. In the prologue, Marías explains that he had edited an anthology of stories by writers so obscure, he was forced to compose their biographical notes using odd, scanty evidence that made it all sound “invented.” It occurred to him that he could do the same thing for authors much more famous (Henry James, Thomas Mann, Djuna Barnes), treating “well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated,” he explains. The result is marvelously irreverent, packed with unforgettable details (Rilke, supposedly, loved the letter y and used any excuse to write it) and endearing patterns (Marías would have us believe that many writers loathe Dostoyevsky). Written Lives immediately earned a spot on my shelf of most treasured objects, and every friend I’ve recommended it to has been equally enchanted.

Read: An introverted writer’s lament

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life , by Yiyun Li

This sad and incredibly beautiful memoir from a writer best known for her fiction takes its title from a line in a notebook by the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. For Li, correspondence, diaries and journals, and literature in general are forms of consolation and companionship that make life worth living even in times of overwhelming despair. The memoir is a record of the reading experiences that saved Li from a dangerous depression. It made me want to dig more deeply into the work of all her favorite writers—Thomas Hardy, Ivan Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor—because she describes them so warmly and affectionately, as if they were friends. Here, as in her novels, Li is philosophical, with a gift for startling aphorisms: “Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured,” she writes. And “One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life,” or “What does not make sense is what matters.” Li’s work is so moving and so very wise.

Madness, Rack, and Honey , by Mary Ruefle

The American poet Mary Ruefle is one of those writers people like to call a “national treasure,” which always has to do with something beyond brilliance or talent, an additional spectacular charm that makes you wish you knew them in “real life.” This collection of lectures on poetry and topics adjacent to poetry (sentimentality, theme, the moon) is the perfect introduction to Ruefle’s particular charisma. She’s unabashedly devoted to poets and poems, but you don’t have to love poetry to fall in love with her voice. She’s plainspoken yet mysterious, always asking curious questions, about death and fear and secrets, and then answering herself with surprising authority. Ruefle is inclined toward quirky asides, but all roads lead back to books: “I offer my dinner guest, after dinner, the choice between regular and decaf coffee, when in fact I don’t have any decaf in the house,” she writes. “I am so sincere in my effort to be a good host that I lie; I think this probably happens all the time in poetry.” Ruefle offers a beautiful example of how a life filled with reading opens and alters the mind.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Author

The Book I Enjoyed The Most (Essay Sample)

Table of Contents

The Book I enjoyed the most

Introduction.

Reading your favorite book promotes a relaxation method to overcome stress and anxiety. The reason behind is that it seeks to make you calmer as you read the details of the book’s content that satisfies your interest. The chosen book that I enjoy reading is Cinderella, which is a fairy tale themed book that presents about a person who met her love interest that changed her life permanently. This is the book that I enjoyed the most that has been able to ensure that it significantly fulfill one’s desire to allow their dreams to have a temporary relief. This is because every person has the tendency to utilize their fantasy in order to satisfy their dreams in a temporary way. This is the reason why I enjoy reading the book that seeks to measure my interest as well as to improve the way I perceive things in life.

I love the book, which is why I consider enjoying it because there is significance from the plot of the story that can relate to my personal life. There is a reflective interest applied by the book that enhances my knowledge and belief that I will be able to relate my personal issues with the book’s scenes. This is because the context is focused on a person’s childhood interest wherein it presents who a child struggles with their childhood challenges. It reflects the chance to know the logical way of improving your cognition in order to accomplish a certain task. All throughout the book’s storyline, it seeks to enhance the advantage of measuring the way that you could cope up with several stressful activities that makes your life better (Rowling, 1997).

One thing that is interesting is when you are going to establish friendship with your enemies. With the combination of fantasies through magical presentation, the context stimulates your senses and promotes your intellectual understanding. The reason behind for this action is to know the strengths and weaknesses as you are learning more about their behavior and character. This is comparable in real life when a person engages a relationship with other individuals to know their real character. Discovering your real friends is important because you will know who will you trust and cooperate. However, the thing that seems inappropriate is the issue regarding violent crashes between the main character and the antagonist of the film. This is the reason why the movie version restricted the audiences by preventing children aged 13 and below not to watch it because it stimulates violence against other individuals.

Why I enjoyed reading it? This is because it helps me bring back my childhood memories and learn new things. The lesson learned from the book I enjoyed reading the most is all about knowing you should choose as your company. The reason behind is that trust is very valuable to every relationship that you establish with other individual or group. When trust is broken, your friendship or relationship could no longer make sense towards a certain individual who betrayed you while establishing friendship. The book I enjoyed the most is recommended to other readers because they can learn more about balancing their friendships with other individuals. In addition, it is important to explore new things because learning helps a person to improve skills and knowledge whenever there are ideas that are fresh.

Rowling, J.K. (1997). Harry Potter: The Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury.

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