Benefits of Reading

Reading leads to success and happiness. Period. But how?

First of all, reading broadens your mental or intellectual horizons. The more you read, the more information you pick up about the world and everything in it. This leads to a solid core of knowledge that is useful to you in a wide variety of real-life situations, personal and professional.

Secondly, reading enriches your word power or your store of vocabulary. And having more words at your command means a greater ability to deal with, and express succinctly, thoughts, conditions, and situations. This added ability greatly augments your chances of success in your field of work. No other activity builds your vocabulary and comprehension skills as effectively as reading.

Thirdly, reading can hone your writing skills. When you read quality material, you imbibe how proficient writers and thinkers present their thoughts, facts, logic, emotions, arguments, humour, etc. Moreover, when you read important and serious works in different spheres of knowledge, you gain skills in analyzing, evaluating, and organising complex information. You develop your critical thinking ability.

Fourthly, avid readers can comprehend others’ situations and attitudes better. If you are a voracious reader, you acquire the ability to separate essential from nonessential information. Also, you can often see how apparently unrelated ideas and facts are connected. As a result, you tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas. You develop or sharpen the ability to understand how other people think and feel, react positively to change and deal with various situations better. You learn how to lead a peaceful life.

Finally, reading is FUN—never ever a dull moment! And, with the availability of lots of free resources online, it often costs nothing. Reading can provide you with enormous inner satisfaction and pleasure; and, not infrequently, a happy escape from the harsh realities of life!

In sum, reading helps you to live a rich, meaningful, and happy life.

Now if you are convinced that reading helps, here’s a list of books that you might like to try reading. It’s an off-the-cuff list of my favourite twenty-one books. I prepared it a few days ago for a group of adult learners of English. It begins with some really simple ones. By the way, I have avoided complex classic literature here because an average English language learner may find it hard to appreciate it.
Here’s the list:

1. Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
3. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
4. Six Thinking Hats by Dr. Edward de Bono
5. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
6. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
7. The Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond
8. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
9. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
10. Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson
11. My Experiments with Truth by M. K. Gandhi
12. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
13. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter
14. Megaliving by Robin Sharma
15. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
16. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
17. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
18. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
19. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
20. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
21. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle