Stop What You’re Doing and Read This is a book of ten articles describing the importance of reading, its place in our age, and highly personal reading adventures. I am sure that you can find different tastes, although I especially liked Jeanette Winterson’s article. I would recommend this book to those who like to read especially on the act of reading.
In twenty-four hours of the day, we can eat, sleep, spend time with our children, our family. We can watch movies with our friends, lover, spouse; we can go to school, travel, work, talk on the phone. Also, we can waste our time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It would be only reasonable to listen to the news, or music, go to the gym. We can also play games and do a lot of things that I can’t count on here.
Why should we let go of all this and read this book? Is its name attractive for you enough? People have always needed stories. We need literature, poems, stories, novels. Because we try to add meaning to our lives, measure its depth, understand our tastes and discover what people are capable of. Good books can be there for us to keep us calm or excite us. Reading is a unique source of pleasure, and everyone should taste a little bit of this pleasure.
The article in Stop What You’re Doing and Read This will make you enjoy reading and explain why reading is so essential. You’ll listen to the effects of reading on our brains, how literature can save lives and change people from ten different authors. Many things demand our attention in a day. It’s time to devote at least some of it to books. Enjoy!
Stop What You’re Doing and Read This
Why should you stop what you’re doing and read a book?
People have always needed stories. We need literature – novels, poetry – because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of an overcrowded daily life. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no-one should live without it.
In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken for granted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention – make books one of them.
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children’s Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
