11 Specific Ways Reading Books Can Change Your Life

Are you in love with books?

I am. Totally and eternally. But I have a lot of friends who haven’t been into books for a long time and never had the inclination of touching a book, until like most engineers, they started studying for cracking the MBA exams. What they want out of the books is vocabulary, but there are things that books can do more than just increase your vocabulary.

Here are a few things that very lucidly change in you when you start reading books.

1. Read a book and open it ten years later, it’ll still make you feel like you belong to the words.

Every time you open the book you’ll feel like you’ve returned home.

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2. Every time you read, you become this person standing there listening to the characters’ ramblings and conversations.

Books talk to you, they live with you and form an unbreakable bond with you through those characters whom you get to observe so closely that you can imagine yourself in their shoes.

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3. Books will make you discover yourself over and over again with every page you turn.

With every new page, new character and a new book, you don’t just discover yourself but build yourself with little pieces of what the story teaches you about life.

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4. Books will challenge you in the eternal battle between the right and wrong and the truth and the lies and you keep on realising how blurry these lines are the world sees so clearly.

Only words have the power to change hearts and lives.

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5. Books will provide you with a permanent escape like Neverland to where Peter Pan could fly off every time you feel like flying off to other worlds and other lives.

Every now and then, everyone wants to escape. Books are a perfect window, better than movies because the movie you’ll see in your mind will be much longer, enjoyable, with no cuts and most importantly, made by you.

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6. Your imagination will assist your memory as you’ll see the stories you read as clear as the day in the eye of your mind and you’ll remember most things easily.

When you see things so clearly, you’ll remember more about the storyline. As your mind strives to remember the stories, it’ll also become better at remembering other things in life.

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7. You’ll always have a friend and if you’re carrying a book with you when travelling alone, you’re not really alone my friend.

as they say, a book is the best friend anyone can have. Well besides a dog. But you cannot carry your dog everywhere, can you? You never have to leave your best friend at home and the books will always listen.

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8. Researchers say that reading improves your brain activity which can last for a long period of time.

A study shows that the activity in the temporal lobe of a human brain is active even in resting state of it. Which makes for higher awareness and intellectual prowess than those who don’t read regularly or don’t have a habit of it at all. 

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9. Books will make you more inclusive and understanding because when you meet a new character who is different, you’ll try to understand that character before you judge him/her and that’s how you will be in real life too.

People with villainous traits, helpless people, poor, rich, with different sexual orientations, you’ll understand their lives better once you open your eyes to them wanting to understand them.

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10. Reading will keep your mind young and by that I mean, flexible. Always ready for a little bend here and there.

They say a man’s brain is set in stone by the age of 30. Well, books make it easier for people not to let that happen. Books will keep your imagination always tangible and ready to bend the way you want it to.

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11. Books will make it easier for you to make other friends but never forget that they were your first friends.

Books will make it easier for you talk to people because they’ll become your wingmen/women and be the topic of your discussion and this will only strengthen your friendship with the books because they’ll bring some gems people to you as friends. 

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My fellow non-reading friends, the papers are addictive, in the best possible way.

Try to see their magic sometime.

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