Why I Read

Salman Rushdie says it so that we don’t have to. (It’s a moot point that he says it rather better. Maybe we should ask him to come and be our guest blogger, hmmm?)
“Books come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature.
When a reader falls in love with a book it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives and those books become parts of the way we see our lives, we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours, they become ours.”