La lectura, 1924
Fuente: https://mediation.centrepompidou.fr
Reading makes you happy. In fact, reading keeps you healthy, open, energized and helps you get a good night’s sleep.
Oscar Wilde said: ‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.’
If Oscar had lived in the age of television he would have been one of those people who believed TV was for appearing on, not for watching.
Research shows that monitor screens of all kinds, big and small, smartphones and home cinemas, deadens the brain cells and softens the synapses. If the grey matter is not stimulated, it is harder to enjoy life’s small pleasures: walking in the countryside, smelling the roses, morning sex with the sun slipping through the window, reading.
When you read a novel, you leave your ego outside the covers of the book and enter the world of the characters. As they confront problems and make choices, you subliminally judge those choices against your own standards and morals. You decide who is a good person and who is a phoney, a cheat, a liar. As you follow the lives of others through the pages of a book, you are constantly growing, learning, developing.
Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano at New York’s New School for Social Research discovered that literary fiction enhances empathy, emotional intelligence and intuition. Good books help readers to understand the difficulties of others and to view their own problems with greater clarity.
Research at Sussex University has shown that reading reduces stress. Less stress enables better sleep, better sleep makes you healthier, happier and more alive. ‘Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation,’ says neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis, who led the programme. ‘This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism.’
If I am depressed (writers often are), disappointed or angry, I read a book and my mood changes. Writing is a disease. Reading is the cure.
Now I have a question: Can you remember the quote by Oscar Wilde?
If you can’t, go back and read the blog again. When you read something twice it stays in the mind – sometimes forever.
He met actress Carol White in Hollywood and wrote her memoirs, Carol Comes Home. It was the first of a dozen books as a ghostwriter, including the Sunday Times bestseller Today I’m Alice – the story of multiple personality disorder survivor Alice Jamieson. His latest book, “How to Rob the Bank of England”, was published in September 2024.
www.cliffordthurlow.com