Amruta Sawant | 
If you ask a bookworm what his or her guilty pleasure is, there’s a good chance they say it’s taking out an old book that has been sitting proudly on their bookshelf and celebrating the smell that hovers in the air after they flip through its worn pages.
Let us see the timeline of humans’ relationship with language, speech and reading scripts. Babies are fed, bathed, and talked to in high pitched voices that make no sense to them, simply because they are someone who cannot understand verbal communication.
Toddlers grow up perceiving language and associating certain words with certain meanings and understand they are capable of realising thoughts and performing actions by simply using communication and speech. Clearly, the role of listening and talking is initially confined to getting a hold of the language that will simplify our lives with the help of our vocals.
It is not until we’ve become four or five years of age that we’re introduced to script and decoding the script, the entire act of which is referred to as successful reading. Perhaps a few of us hate it right from kindergarten and the hatred or mere tolerance of it persists until we’re through with graduation. We don’t enjoy textbooks as much as we enjoy reading comics or gossip magazines.
The reasons why one does not enjoy reading at any age may include the following:
1. Limiting the need of reading books to academic textbooks for obtaining formal education.
2. The sheer size of some novels or the fact that they are lengthy and consist of few or no pictures and have complex words.
3. Poor time management that leaves one with barely any time to devote to reading despite one being interested.
4. Lack of motivation to simply pick up a book because one hasn’t done it before, though one is interested and has time on his hands.
We live in a digital age when a huge chunk of our global community at the drop of a hat takes to mobiles, social media, video games and streaming devices for entertainment. While all these revolutionary developments with their sleek, shiny electric devices, screens and portable machines have managed to grab a lot of people’s fancy, there still exists a population of book lovers whose idea of both entertainment and education revolves entirely around humbly bound books whose contents have been charged with the heart and soul of people who wrote them.
Benefits / Importance of Reading Books:
You can benefit from reading books in these 5 ways:
Economical medium of information:
While the majority of the urban populace can afford laptops, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, educational videos’ subscriptions besides books for educational uses and for entertainment, the budding minds in remote areas of developed and underdeveloped countries educate themselves with the use of modestly priced books alone.
Books are instruments of information
Books are instruments that most people can afford and they are far from burning a hole in one’s pocket, comparably. One of the benefits of reading books is that a reader always will have knowledge more than a non-reader and one can only know more. It makes one immune from brainwashing, instills the courage to live by logic and makes one question what needs to be questioned and change the world for the ultimate better.
Improvement of vocabulary:
No matter what sort of books you read; it would only add to your vocabulary. The newly deposited words will all be used for you to be a stronger, better communicator.It is one of the main advantages of reading books. Every brilliant writer and speaker in the world you meet would have been a devoted reader and would have been incredibly fond of books.
Therapeutic reading:
Yes, bibliotherapy is a thing. It involves reading to overcome one’s mental issues, fears, or phobias, to come to terms with life changes and even to become emotionally better. It may involve fiction books or even nonfiction books, such as biographies or self-help books. By exposing oneself to another’s experience or simply by reading differently plotted stories, a person gets to temporarily be in the shoes of someone who might have had the same experience or a better or a worse one.
It gives one strength and perspective along with confidence and causes an immediate brewing of ideas, solutions, and life changing outlooks on a spectrum of situations. Readers also have shown to have improved memory and a reduced chance of having dementia later in their life, supporting Alvin Toffler’s maxim that says that the library is a hospital for the mind.
Books are low maintenance objects:
One can be disappointed with their expensive, proudly bought electronic devices when there is a power cut. When there is an accidental spilling, a bookworm will be far from frustrated in such situations because one can dry a book. He or she simply would be liked to be left alone in a sunlit place with a book and a cup of hot chocolate, away from the objects that feed off people who are overly reliant on them.
The utility of good old books has jumped the barrier of time. They have been passed down through ancestors and have been tainted with influences of various eras. They have been written, scrutinized, altered, rewritten as years have changed into centuries and as centuries have melted into millenniums, making them the oldest and the most versatile medium of information.