lady readingI don’t know about you, but reading is kind of important to me. Reading is the way to success in any medium.

If you want to be a doctor, you have to read medical books. If you want to become a lawyer, there are books for that too. Even if you don’t want a high-profile career like that, you still need to read manuals and instruction guides on a pretty routine basis.

Some people are crazy enough to major in English in college and then they have to read almost everything.

Literature is one of the greatest forms of entertainment and it sometimes feels as if it’s losing steam with audiences across the world.

Why read a book?

Who has the time, what with all the time we spend on binge-watching Netflix and going to see every single superhero movie that comes out?

There are enough studies out there to prove that people who read a book on a routine basis not only function better, but they’re happier and smarter.

And it makes sense, right?

Books, whether it’s about medicine, law or a fictional story about World War II, it’s been written by a high-end expert in the subject.

You’re always going to learn something when you read, and you’re going to expand your mind further than you knew capable.

Yes, sometimes we can get that out of television.I am not talking about reality tv shows of course

Television is smart these days, isn’t it?

But there’s something absolutely engaging and beautiful about the prose of a novel, don’t you think?

Take a look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example.

It’s a magnificent tale about what it means to reach for the American dream so desperately that you don’t even pay attention to what should really make you happy.

Jay Gatsby is obsessed with throwing parties as a way of attracting the attention of his former-lover Daisy. She left him when he didn’t have enough money to provide her a mass amount of wealth. Neither of these characters properly defines their love with what they should.

Instead, they keep a close eye on their bank accounts and parties as an indication of whether or not they’re comfortable. This novel was written in 1925, but the themes still hold true today. We still have people with misplaced priorities.

Isn’t that interesting, that something so simple could transcend several generations?

Literature teaches us all something about ourselves.

Even Twilight, which gets a lot of unnecessary hate from people who probably haven’t read it, inspired millions of teenagers and pre-teens to read more.

If reading Twilight leads to the reading something much more significant, such as The Hunger Games or War and Peace, then by all means, praise Twilight! It’s not as if we read great literature as teenagers either.

There’s no reason to publically renounce anything that inspires a generation to read. The ends justify the means, and when it comes to reading, the means is all about how much of our potential we reach for.

Unlike Jay Gatsby and Daisy, we can learn how to define our own true happiness just by observing. One page at a time.