As many who ready my daily offers will know, I’ve been serialising my first novel Marcello’s Date each day for the last 4 months. I had no idea how many had been reading it but was really moved by the emails I’ve received this week from readers saying how much they enjoyed it and even how it had brightened their lives.
The power of stories can be profound. If we’ve ever had tales read to us as children, we’ll remember the comfort it brings to lie back and imagine the words coming to life in our heads. There’s something organic and soulful about reading which I for one, know I don’t do enough of.
Just recently my wife and I were considering giving up our Portuguese lessons – far too much focus on the structure of nouns and pronouns for us – until just before our last lesson, the teacher decided to read and translate with us a simple storybook. Boom! We were back in and hooked… and loving it again!
I know many of us find it hard to allocate the time to reading but the escape a good story gives us can be wholesome and even life-changing. A story can take us places we’d never visit and give us an escape from life’s mundane and taxing. It can lift us to emotional heights and ignite our empathy; draw us into undiscovered worlds and confront our prejudices.
In short, reading can keep us in touch with ourselves and help us reconnect with humanity and I for one, pledge here to do it more often. I want to be challenged and connected more, to be elated and excited by words again and I know, given the technology we all have to our fingertips, the power to do that it is entirely doable, even for a few moments during our busy days. We’re just an App away from reconnecting.