Want to become a member of Eat My News? You can enrol for EMN membership now from here.
The musty scent of those yellow pages embeds the power to pull us into another world. Those rusty pages, black and white prints hold the ability to transport us into the unknown, unheard spaces.
A book even in its physical form has many lessons to teach us. The wrinkles on the spines teach us how to care, the bent pages teach us how we can stand up after falling, the old paper shows how beautiful growing old is. We can live a thousand lives and learn a thousand lessons through the enchanting power of books.
In a deserted locale, a freckled boy is successful in dreaming about ships and sailing because of books, young fiery students can dream of revolution as they read how rulers have fallen to the ground in history, we fantasize about romance as the characters in our books lead us through the beautiful lane of love.
Ideologies stick with us, just like the scent of the books that helped instill them in the first place. Villains turn out to be sad characters with a dark past, and heroes as faulty privileged humans, lovers as rebels and oppressors as people who are led on the wrong path. We see humans in a different light, we grow kinder, and feel more empathetic towards others as books teach us that every person has his/her story to tell.
When friends betray us or our parents disappoint us, we turn to these silent spectators that enclose worlds within them. Adventures in the Arctic or the sunset in Erasmusbrug, or the snow gleaming Kanchendzonga all seem to be closer to us, even on a sunny afternoon. Touching stars, or floating in outer spaces, feel like experiences easily accessible to us with the help of these friends with dusty spines and wrinkled pages.
However, in today‘s fast-moving world, people have lost patience and zeal to sit in an armchair to enjoy a good book. The Netflix timeline and the consistent zeal of posting on Facebook and Instagram have hampered the lifestyle of healthy book reading. Hence, to bring back the same zeal, we have listed out the most important advantages of reading books for you.
1. Books are an ideal company
Whenever you are too tired to step out of the comforts of your house and hang out, these yellow leafed friends would become your confidante. You can lose yourself and not feel bored even for a moment. Sometimes, when talking feels like an ordeal, and your mind is filled with all kinds of negative thoughts, books suck all these negativities out of you and give you respite.
2. Books instil creativity
By giving wings to our imagination, books instil creativity in our thinking, speaking, and writing skills. We gain the ability to easily weave powerful sentences that are bound to impact our readers and listeners. This increases our self-confidence and as our creative intellect enables us to speculate on situations with a unique approach.
3. Books make us patient
In this world of mind-boggling emotions, books give us rest and make us patient. After arguments with our loved ones, when we're unable to sleep because of our mind that keeps replaying the incident over and over again, books calm us down as they immerse us into their world and lull us to sleep. On days when we're disappointed with ourselves, books show us how every protagonist goes through cumbersome stages in life but emerge victorious through patience and self-love.
4. Books increase our knowledge
The things we know and things we don’t are differentiated by a huge margin. The things we could learn and things we could see, or the things we haven’t heard of and are yet to read about, are vast. In this sea of unknown things, books become our guiding lights and lead us from darkness, as we increase our knowledge-base with each word they whisper in our ears.
5. Books teach us empathy
Humans constantly differentiate. They plot and plan, manipulate and gossip, and can never be everyone’s friend. As humans, we are incapable of easily accepting a point of view that is different from our own. Thus, any little discrepancy pushes us away from each other. However, with books in our hands, we grow out of this stage of deficiency of empathy and learn that every person has his/her own story to tell and we cannot judge them without a hint of their perspective.
Hence, it is vital to possess a healthy habit like book-reading which takes us closer to ourselves and help us find equilibrium that is often lost in this fast-paced lifestyle of our times.
Written by - Anwesha Basu
Edited by - Vasudha Sabharwal
Social