Why reading matters

Books, reading, literature – unyielding foundations of lives well spent. Wellsprings of inspiration, information and enlightenment; birthplaces of empathy, and companions of relaxation. In the face of unprecedented social upheaval and ever-diminishing options for human contact, books and reading remain a constant and critical component of our lives. Here we ask some Penguin Random House authors why books and reading matter to them. 

Anna Funder
Reading is completely central to my life. I tell my children that if they have a book they’ll never be lonely and they’ll never be bored. I’m competing there with screens and screen games, but nothing expands your interior life, which is to say expands your actual life, like reading. It is an incredible magic to be inside someone else’s mind and heart, to have access past barriers of time, language and social convention to just about anyone, anytime. Everything else is pictures, surface. A movie – much as I love them – will use music to force you to cry, almost unwilled. A book does it on the purest, most intense empathy.

Benjamin Stevenson
When I was younger, I was a classic escapist reader – I just wanted to devour as many stories as possible. It was all about the excitement of getting to the next chapter, or the big twist, or the climactic showdown. Reading was a very solitary activity. However, I think books grow into you and I now enjoy reading to challenge myself with new perspectives and voices. So reading is important to me not only as an escape where I am being ‘talked’ to, but it’s also a ‘conversation’ as well.

Kaz Cooke
From the time I was little, reading was an escape and a comfort. It's not a stretch to say that as soon as I knew what they were, I was addicted to books. We owned only a handful of books as a family, but my Mum took me to the local library as a pre-schooler, and then I had the school library and the op-shop, and as a teenager, the local second-hand bookshop where I worked part-time. For me, the smell of old books, the act of sitting sideways in an armchair with my legs folded over the arm of the chair, reading: that's my home ­– in a book.

Fiona McIntosh
As a wordsmith I am essentially reading all day for my own storytelling and at night I pick up someone else’s book and admire their storytelling, so reading underpins my professional life and brings pleasure to my personal life. I’m very choosy about who I read because I don’t have time to spend with work I don’t connect with for whatever reason. I am specific in my genres – I love history, crime, thrillers. Reading is the ultimate escape for me. It is the most intimate form of entertainment too because it depends entirely on my imagination taking cues from characters and events on the written page and making them large, colourful and three-dimensional in my mind. A well-constructed piece of written fiction unfolds in my mind like a movie and frankly, I don’t think I could ever be lonely as long as there are books in the world.

Paul French
It’s my major activity – I read every day first thing in the morning and last thing at night and as much as I can during the day. It’s more important than writing and if you don’t read you won’t be able to write anyway. I have to read for research as well as for reviewing and various pieces of journalism but I still find time to read for pleasure. I’m quite disciplined and make sure I enjoy genre writing – historical fiction, crime – but seek out literature and especially writing in translation so I don’t become overly focussed on English-language writers. Books are everywhere around me all the time – I write mostly in the London Library in St. James’s Square and then come home to a book-filled house. As Anthony Powell said, ‘Books do furnish a room’.

Majok Tulba
I love that you can enter the alternative reality in a book and there is great pleasure in becoming part of that world and those characters.

Ceridwen Dovey
As with most writers, I came to writing via reading. Having enjoyed the pleasure, as Virginia Woolf once said, of reading yourself into ‘the middle of a world', like ‘shutting the doors of a Cathedral’, I wanted to be able to create that feeling for any future readers I might have.

The best part about reading is that it’s a meeting of minds that paradoxically happens in absolute solitude: a book is both written and read alone, yet it’s such a powerful form of intersubjective communication, one of the few ways we have of sharing what is in or on our minds with another human being.

Stephen Giles
Reading is the way I understand the world and it is one of the cornerstones of my life. It’s almost impossible for me to objectively examine the place that reading has in my life, in the same way that it is difficult to be clear-eyed about any obsession. I only know that as a younger reader, discovering novels for the first time, I remember that palpable feeling of astonishment when I realised that through books, I could not only live other lives and experience other times and places, but I would gain access to how other human beings felt. That’s the wondrous thing about books – insight. I don’t suppose I’ve ever lost that sense of wonder and it’s that promise of deeper understanding that brings me back to books again and again. Like most avid readers, I always have a stack of books awaiting my attention and that sense of delicious anticipation – what will I find in its pages, what journey will I take, who will I meet, how will it make me feel? – that magic has never left me.

Tiffany Tsao
I’ve valued reading for different reasons depending on my stage of life. When I was young I liked books because of the opportunity for escape they provided. I was a rather socially awkward child and teenager and it was comforting to have the option of withdrawing from my terrifying social life to crawl inside a good book.

Now, in my mid-thirties, and especially after having studied and taught literature at university level, I’ve started to cherish reading for the opposite reason – its ability to open eyes and minds and hearts, to endow us with the ability to inhabit perspectives apart from our own and experiences of which we would otherwise be ignorant. For this reason, I’ve become especially passionate about literature in translation, ‘world literature’ (for lack of a better term), and literature about people and places that would otherwise be off our radars. It’s also why I translate novels from Indonesian into English and why I support and work with publishers of translated literature.   

Bernard Schaffer
I've been a devoted reader my entire life. As a child, it meant visiting second-hand book stores with my mother and seeking out whatever rare treasures I could unearth there. I still remember finding books by Tolkien, Stephen King, Eric Van Lustbader, Harlan Ellison, Star Trek novels, or whatever author I happened to be obsessed with at the time.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but sometimes I have to seek out the print edition because I want to see how the author structured their sentences or paragraphs. The mechanics of it all become much more important.

Andrew Hutchinson
I read all the time, thousands upon thousands of words per week. I’m picky about what I really like, but I often come back to various passages or books over and over again for inspiration and to learn how sentence structures work.

For me, reading is about understanding, trying to capture a moment in your words. Very few people can do this well, and even fewer can do it consistently. And that’s what I love about it, trying to find those moments of shared passion, and getting to feel exactly what the author felt when he or she put down the words.

It’s about expanding your world beyond what you can see and touch, and trying to connect with something more.