A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face – E.P. Morgan
Reading is unique in its ability to make us dream. You can be emperor of Arabia, a free-spirited maverick of the Beat generation, a 19th century aristocratic landowner in Russia. Join a rebel group in India then travel to Mozambique, be a teak merchant in British Burma, homeless in Paris or a psychohistorian on planet Trantor. Books create a fantasy of exotic landscapes, fast forward to the future and bring ancient history to life.
Novels can take your imagination in many surprising ways. You can identify with the hero, or feel for the villain, be sorry for the victim or strangely side for the oppressor, recognise yourself in the smart guy, or the idiot.
Paragraph after paragraph, page over page, our minds fill in, with our own colours, canvas made of words, ambients and situations we could never experience otherwise. No ambition, sensation or emotion is barred from the reader. Everything is possible, perceptions of fear, anger or sadness, anticipation, surprise and joy melt together in our conscious and subconscious minds. Our nervous and endocrine systems pump chemicals through the body, the excitement of adrenaline and dopamine, the comfort of serotonin.
Like eating something delicious, something hearty and substantial, you take a bite followed by a second bite. Texture and flavours change, some chapters you need to chew more, some others, as your appetite grows, melt in your mouth.
Great for the brain, memory and concentration, reading novels can reduce stress levels and give you a healthy way to escape the daily grind, the sometimes monotonous, quiet life of the middle class. If it doesn’t help you live longer, it surely helps you live better. You can be on the treacherous path of an expedition to mount Everest, while safely sitting in your living room or neighbourhood cafe. Living the ins and outs of a new age cult, while on the commuting train to work.
In an ideal world, everyone would contribute to society without giving up most of their time and energy. We all would have more moments of freedom to enjoy what we love doing. Or what we love being, we are human beings, not human doings after-all.
Well, society might not be ideal for quite some time yet, so I decided to make it as good as possible for myself now. My current lifestyle includes regular late afternoons or early evenings in beautiful settings with an open book. And you can too, everyone can, I used to borrow from public libraries for free and there are millions of books easily available on the cloud. My love for novels started as a teenager and I always indulged in reading, even when working hard and leading a fast paced lifestyle in London.
If you already are a faithful reader, you’ll be smiling now. If not, give it a go, switch off the TV and let yourself be seduced by the magic of literature. You’ll never regret it.
Because there are many hobbies and passions one can absorb himself with. Few are as fulfilling as reading novels, as novels, through the eyes of the characters, make you live 100 different lives.
Here are some of my favourite books:
Magic Seeds; Half a Life – VS Naipaul
The Feast of the Goat; The Bad Girl – Mario Vargas Llosa
Narcissus and Goldmund; Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
100 Years of Solitude; Living to Tell the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marques
For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Glass Palace; The Sea of Poppies – Amitav Gosh
Burmese Days; Down & Out in Paris and London – George Orwell
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Dice Man – Luke Rhinehart
The Hand of Fatima – Ildefonso Falcones
The Pearl – John Steinbeck
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov