“You are what you read,” they say. I whole-heartedly agree. I become a different person each time I read a different book. When I intently peruse the carefully wrought out dialogues of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I vow to myself that I will never settle for any love less passionate than that of the heroine Jane Eyre and her master, Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester. As I gently close the paperback cover of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, I become a Holden Caulfield myself, spotting phonies everywhere and despising every one of them.

I become a different person each time I read a different book. However, there is one fundamental fact that does not shift beneath the ground: a good book never makes an ephemeral impression on my mind. I still remember the stark confusion and shock that registered into my mind when I first read Wild Animals I have Known by Ernest Seton. And that was about a decade ago. I can also still fondly recall how I reveled the Jean Webster novel, Daddy Long Legs, with renewed affection over and over again. Emotions and feelings evinced by some books can never be effaced, and you know you have read a good book when it claims a permanent spot in the back of your mind.

So why should you read? So what if a book makes a striking effect on your mind? Once you realize the joy books can bring, it is like discovering ambrosia- the food that rewards immortal life. The feelings elicited by books can be powerful, exalting… You are born a new man; you view the surroundings around you in a completely divergent manner. And it is this resurrected person that can make a true difference for the world.