All us Facebook and internet voyeurs have seen this picture before. I stole it…um…borrowed it from Facebook. I like it because it is exactly how I see libraries, any small stack of books or randomly placed manuscript. There are unlimited possibilities to what you can discover, feel, learn, and experience in reading or listening to a book.

Studies have been conducted on reading and the effects on the human brain. Science reveals that the brain does not make a distinction between reading about an experience and actually living it. Whether reading or experiencing it, the same neurological regions in the brain are stimulated. When someone says to me that they do not read, after I get over my shock that I am actually talking to a person who does not read, I explain that they need to see a doctor because something may be seriously wrong with their brain.

Books, no matter what form they come in are amazing things. They can change your life, but have you ever wondered why?

It is a personal human connection. That book that you can’t get enough of, you know the one. The one you stay up so late to finish that you can’t function the next day. Yeah, that one, that obsession….it didn’t just come to be. It wasn’t just floating invisible in the air and just appeared on that shelf waiting for you. Behind that book is a writer who, I can promise you, poured sweat, tears, hours, blood and other unimaginable pieces of them self into while creating that book. They suffered pain, felt joy, were scared, and maybe almost burned down their desk. They did all that not just so you could have the magical experience, that is part of it, but for the writer, it was a matter of life and death. That book demanded to be written. If the book was not written it may have been the death of the another. All writers want the reader to feel what they felt or live what their characters are living when they read that book. Readers want to get what they need, doesn’t matter what it is, out of books. That writer-reader connection is essential to the life of the author and some readers as much as food or air.

So, the next time you are reading a book you can’t put down, and you run across some poor soul that says they don’t read, try not to pity them. Show them what they are missing.

~Lori O’Gara