THE JOY OF READING

If I had a penny for every time someone has told me they have no time to read, I'd be a wealthy man. According to a recent statistic only 15% of people read regularly in the UK and 40% said that they didn't even have any books in the home. It's a sad state of affairs - indeed I have friends who never read, claiming that if a book was any good it would be a movie. Now movies are all very well but reading is a much more encompassing experience. Don't these people realise that with a movie you only see the story, but with a book you live it?

With a book a much greater level of involvement is required than simply sinking down in front of a screen but the rewards too are far greater. I have been a constant reader since I was a kid - I've always got something on the go - if there are no books around I'll grab a magazine or even a comic book. Most of my free time is spent reading. Now I'll accept that people often live busy lives but anyone who claims not to have time to read, simply doesn't want to read bad enough. A few snatched minutes a day are enough to get lost in a good story. We readers read everywhere - while waiting for a bus, on the train, the plane, in bed last thing at night, seated in the garden, laying in the bath.

I read in two different ways. The most common way is as a reader, during which I enjoy the story for its own sake and the second is as a writer where I enjoy the resonance of the language used. With favourite books I try and analyse what it is about the book I found so compulsive, what it was that kept me turning the pages. I feel that books have taught me more about human nature than people have themselves. Even the most escapist genre fiction will, when done well, have something important to say about ourselves.

Books are simply wonderful things. With a good book you can be transported anywhere in the world, or indeed off the world, without leaving the comfort of your armchair. You can experience sensations that are alien to your normal life, you can enter dark and dangerous environments and emerge unscathed but strangely wiser for the experience. You can occupy the minds of the heroic or the sick and twisted. You can for the time spent between the covers enter the world of the characters in the book and experience their emotions on a primal level, you can, for a short time, become those characters.

Books are wonderful thing.

You not missing anything if you don't read - You're missing everything.