Do you remember the first book you ever read? It was the first book that you read all by yourself, without help from your parents. Your face lit up when you read the last word on the last page as you realized you finally finished. Where did that excitement for reading go? As reading became less of a challenge and more of a basic skill, the excitement went away. Now, everybody says that they don’t have time to read, or they don’t have the attention span to get into a novel. What people need to understand is that reading is not a burden. It is a privilege.

I think the biggest problem is that people are turned off by the idea of reading. In high school, students are forced to read books and write reports on them. Since most of the books on the reading lists aren’t from this century, it takes a certain amount of brain power that many students don’t want to spend to comprehend the language. They think it is “dumb” or “not worth their time”. After four years of reading books that they don’t want to, most students never pick up a book for fun after graduation.

What people don’t realize is that reading these books can actually help them. It is a proven fact that reading books can increase your memory, broaden your vocabulary, relieve stress, improve your writing skills, and increase your intelligence. Just like you need to work out your body to stay in shape, you need to work out your brain to stay sharp. Reading is exercise for your mind. You need to push yourself in order to see results. After all, who doesn’t find intelligence attractive?

Sometimes I feel like we are trained monkeys pushing buttons on a keyboard all day. Everything we do is online. Any resonance from the past is constantly being replaced by a newer, more technologically sound version of itself. The encyclopedia has been replaced by Google. Snail mail has been replaced by email. Face to face communication has had a cell phone wedged in between it. It is hard to pull ourselves away from the screens that are an undeniably essential part of our lives. But reading does so much more for us mentally, than these technologies ever will. I always describe reading as watching an internal television. The most entertaining part is building environments in your mind and envisioning what the characters would look like in real life. The best books are the ones that nearly suck you into the story and create an escape from your own life. It is quite difficult to match the imagination that comes from our own heads. Movies and television shows are wonderful in their own ways, but there is nothing quite like the scenes you create when reading a great book.

This isn’t a lecture or a call to arms against technology. This is a reminder that the human mind is capable of so many extraordinary things. Your eyes see markings on a paper and your brain translates them into language that you can understand. Your imagination can take you to far away places or to places that don’t even exist if you let it. It is our privilege and duty as humans to use these talents as much as we can so that reading a paperback book does not become an archaic pastime. There are over 129 million published books. Choose one and start reading.