The benefits of reading have long been lauded with age-old adages being that reading broadens the mind, that it lets you explore new worlds, live a thousand lives ,and expands your imagination. These are all true, of course.

Reading lets you “travel” when you are contained in a single town ,and it helps the reader probe the inner meaning of complex and eternal human questions (i.e. how do we live meaningful and fulfilling lives? Why are we here? Where are we going after we die?). Reading can help us deal with the psychological questions that humanity has wondered since our beginning. Nowadays, there are statistics (both comforting and alarming) that let us know just how crucial and enlightening reading, in fact, is.

Quoting Maya Angelou: “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” Just how correct Ms. Angelou was, cannot be understated.

First, we can deal with some of the more obvious reasons that it is good to read. According to a Berkeley paper, reading can expose you to 50 percent more words than primetime television; enabling you to do better on tests and to also have a more fluent vocabulary. Plus, since you are active in the process of reading (compared to being a passive recipient when watching television), you activate areas in your brain more. This makes you think, and thus making you that much smarter by both improving your memory as well as helping to hone your concentration and focus.

Also- remember those universal and “eternal human questions” mentioned earlier? Reading can make you more empathetic in the sense that it helps you think of things from another perspective, helping you see that we as a species really do deal with many of the same questions and difficulties. Those are only a few of the benefits of reading with others being that it can help you relax, help you sleep ,and also raise self esteem. All in all, reading is a definite boon mentally.

Now let’s look at some of the scarier research that has been dredged up about how not reading can affect a life, and even though some of these statistics seem to be almost too unbelievable, I’ll leave that for you to ponder on.

“Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare. Over seventy percent of America’s inmates cannot read above a fourth grade level.” But wait-there’s more: “Nearly 85 percent of the juveniles who face trial in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate”; “students who don’t read proficiently by the third grade are four times likelier to drop out of school”. And, to top it off, “ one in four children in America grow up without learning how to read.”

Reading can have such a profound effect upon a person’s life and, clearly, not reading can have just as powerful an effect. So read! Read to children! When you finish a book, pick up another and read more! One survey concluded that nearly a quarter of adults had not read a single book in an entire year. This, along with the statistics showcasing how not being proficient in literacy at a young age, can drastically diminish chances for future success, and is downright depressing-both on a personal level and on a national level . As one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”