Getting Lost in a Good Book Can Help Keep You Healthy

I’m a novelist and it’s obviously in my interest to encourage people to read. But there’s increasing evidence that reading isn’t just for pleasure, or merely a way of improving literacy skills and factual knowledge. 【小题1】

Firstly, reading helps to lengthen attention spans in children and improves their ability to think clearly. 【小题2】 It is essential to learn this skill as a small child. The more they do it, the better they get at it.

Also, reading can help people learn to empathize(产生共鸣). A recent study at the University of Michigan found that there had been a 48% decrease in empathy among college students. 【小题3】 In a computer game, you might have rescued a princess, but you don’t care about her, you just want to win. But a princess in a book has a past, present and future, she has connections and motivations. We can relate to her. We see the world through her eyes.

As a matter of fact, reading is far from a passive activity. Reading exercises the whole brain. When we read and imagine the landscapes, sounds, smells and tastes described on the page, the various areas of the brain that are used to process these experiences in real life are activated, creating new neural(神经) pathways. 【小题4】 This doesn’t happen when we’re watching TV or playing a computer game.

Getting sucked into a good novel appears to be beneficial to our mental health too. 【小题5】 Reading not only avoids feelings of loneliness, it helps us to wind down, de-stress and forget our own problems for a while.

Steph Clemence always intended to go to college. She had good grades and considered herself college bound. But life has a tendency to throw obstacles in the way. When her father died tragically in a car accident, leaving her mother to support three daughters on a modest income, paying for college became out of the question.

Around that time, Steph tried to figure out what to do with a life that had differed so much from the plan she’d carefully laid out. The answer came one afternoon when she found a list from the English teacher she’d had in her junior year, Dorothy Clark. One afternoon, Mrs. Clark walked into the classroom carrying a pile of papers. She instructed each students to take one. The handout was titled Mrs. Clark’s Book List. “It wasn’t homework,” the teacher announced, “but it could be a road map. Some of you might not go on to higher education, but you can continue to learn.” It would, she believed, form the equivalent of two years at a liberal arts college.

“She knew the income levels of the kids in my high school,” says Steph. “Working-class and logging families. She knew most of us would not go to college. But she knew we could continue to learn after high school. She was right about that.” Steph studied the list. Each of those books sparked her passion to learn more, which made her look for other books that weren’t on the list, hoping to deepen her knowledge. Over the years, the reading list was a constant in her life, traveling with her even on vacations.

Now Steph is 70 and she never did get to college. But she has only four books left to read from the list. She expects to complete them sometime in 2023. “Each of the books has added something to who I am and how I see the world.” she says, “I now have gained an insight to see why things happened and what it might mean.”

If there was one good thing to come out of lockdowns, it was improved book sales and rates of reading, especially among children. A survey of 70, 000 children and young people by the National Literacy Trust, however, has found this gain is now gone: figures are now equal to just before the pandemic, when the trust recorded the lowest levels of reading enjoyment since it first asked the question 17 years ago. A concurrent study of 8, 000 five to eight-year-olds found that nearly one in five did not have a book at home.

These questions are not about basic literacy but about the habit of reading. The children surveyed spoke of books giving them subjects to talk about; of entertainment and information; of reading helping them to understand people unlike themselves; of finding in books a place of escape and a reduction of loneliness; of aid in coping with difficulty. “It helps me in learning about what I am feeling. That is because I have a hard time expressing my emotions and would rather not bother anyone,” as one child put it.

Children who read at home are six times more likely to be able to read above expected levels, while one study of 160, 000 adults from 31 countries found children whose homes held at least 80 books, but whose schooling ended at 13or 14, were “as literate and technologically quick in adulthood as university graduates.” Another found these children also went on to earn more.

It is not that most parents don’t understand this. A reason often cited for the lack of books at home is the cost of living. Almost a fifth of Britain’s public libraries have closed in 10 years, while one in eight primary schools in England, rising to one in four in disadvantaged communities, do not have a library or given reading space. Furthermore, the Department for Education, with its insistence on systematic synthetic phonics (自然拼读法), would keep an eye on the number of children who told the National Literacy Trust that teaching in primary schools had put them off reading. Compared with other problems this country faces, providing varied reading material is relatively straightforward to fix. We owe it to children to do so.