Why Do We Read?

To live in a world of readers creates a hunger to belong, and that hunger motivates learning.

By Peter Temes

I read for pleasure, to learn things I want to know, to hear news from faraway places, and to keep my mind occupied when I travel. My wife reads for similar reasons, and some more of her own, I'm sure. We often read together to share pride in our children's work—we read what they have written, and we see their words as remarkable gifts.

Children read for many reasons. In his autobiography, the prolific writer Isaac Asimov talked about learning to read in order to navigate his New York City neighborhood using street signs. I can remember the day Katie, my oldest daughter, told her sister Leah that learning to read is fabulous because when you read, "you see whole new worlds." Emily Dickinson had a similarly grand sense of the reader's motive: "There is no frigate like a book," she wrote, "To take us lands away." She understood that words on the page held power wildly beyond proportion to what they seemed to be. She ended her famous poem about books this way: "How frugal is the chariot/ That bears a human soul!" Frugal indeed, using no more than ink and sound to bring us messages about our own deepest nature, our greatest yearnings, and the...