I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love reading. 

It’s always been a core part of who I am and how I understand the world. At first, I think a large part of it was out of convenience — my younger sister was sick from the time I was four until I was 10, and the only company I had in waiting rooms and on long car rides to the doctor’s office was books, first “Warriors” at six and then “Percy Jackson” and “Harry Potter” as I got older. 

Reading so frequently since such a young age has had a huge impact on my perspective. More than anything else, it’s taught me empathy. 

I’ve never been someone who’s good at opening up to others, and growing up, I didn’t feel like I understood people. Even before we moved states, those outside my family could be closed-off and confusing to me in a way that books never were. 

But as much as I felt like I didn’t click with people, books bridged my understanding with them. 

Books taught me to imagine what other people’s lives were like — the chapters I wasn’t a part of, the past I didn’t get to see shaping the present I interacted with. 

We all move through the world with hidden stories. Fiction showed me how to see them — to stop assuming I know anyone’s full arc from a few pages of their life.

This has, in small and big ways, shaped almost every interaction and relationship I’ve had, including some of the most important ones in my life, such as with my little sister. 

My sister and I have always handled emotions differently. I turn inward; she explodes. 

For years, I saw her anger as an attack. I thought it came from a place of hatred, and since I can remember, I’ve let that inaccurate and insensitive judgement cloud how I saw and interacted with her. It took reading about a deeply angry character in Pierce Brown’s “Red Rising” for me to understand that anger isn’t just destructive, but can be protective, too.   

Suddenly, I saw my sister differently as well — not as someone immature, but someone handling pain the only way she knew how. Someone like me.

I didn’t absorb these skills overnight, and they weren’t easy to internalize. 

But they’ve helped me in every aspect of my life, as a writer, leader, friend, daughter, and person. They’ve made me more willing to think through someone else’s perspective than judge them at a time in our country where compassion is notably absent from the cultural conversation.  

And these things I’ve learned from all the time I spent with my head buried in books — empathy, critical thinking, curiosity — are incredibly important outside of them. 

We’re never going to get to a point — as a country or as a human race — where we can push past hatred if we aren’t curious. If you’re blindly despising someone for their identity or beliefs, you’re not questioning how they became the person standing in front of you. You’re not imagining who they were ten minutes ago, or ten years, until suddenly you don’t see a stranger but another person who used to be a kid, who at one point had more dreams than regrets and couldn’t sleep without their nightlight. 

You’re not seeing another person. 

I’m not saying reading gifts you with supernatural skills of understanding. It doesn’t let you read minds. It doesn’t open people up any more than they already were, or teach you infinite patience and forgiveness. 

But it makes you want to know. 

I think what’s so special about reading is that, while you’re in a book, you’re completely immersed in someone else’s perspective. As different from you as they might be, it’s pretty hard to dislike someone if you’re experiencing everything they have, seeing in real time how those moments have shaped their perception of others and therefore how they interact with them and the world. 

However, our favorite modern-day medium — short form videos — doesn’t allow you to as easily connect with another person.

It’s a lot easier to hate someone after watching a short video of them. 

It’s a lot easier to think you know everything there is to know about their perspective. It’s a lot easier to dismiss not just their words but their identity, to laugh and continue scrolling, growing desensitized not just to violent language or carelessness but the human experience itself. 

I know because I’ve done this myself. Since I got Instagram a little over a year ago, I’ve lost count of how many afternoons I’ve sat on my phone, my book just within arm’s reach but further from my mind than ever.

And social media doesn’t just make reading a less appealing option, it makes it harder to do. 

A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that children aged nine to 13 years old with rising levels of social media exposure performed poorer on reading, memory, and vocabulary tests compared with peers who had little to no social media usage. 

While the differences in scores weren’t absolutely drastic, the study emphasized that it took place over only a two year period. Over time, the habits it looked at could more profoundly impact cognitive and social development. 

And these studies looking at our relationship with technology coincide with national educational reports showcasing a tremendous decrease in analytical and comprehension scores. 

In January of 2025, The Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) reported that less than 33% of students nationwide are working at the NAEP Proficient level in reading at both fourth and eighth grade, a score which correlates to students being able to consistently understand written text and interpret its meaning. 

That’s less than a third of the 54.6 million students in private and public schools. 

And it’s not just students.

Over 45 million American adults read below a fifth grade level, and 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate.  

The skills that our country needs most — to compete on a global stage, to build compassion for one another, to stay informed in an era of misinformation and AI — are disappearing. 

These are foundational skills — not just for academics, but for life. More than that, they’re expensive ones: low levels of literacy cost America up to $2.2 trillion annually. 

I could list the many cognitive benefits to reading, or the fact that those who read have a 20% reduction in mortality compared to those who don’t, but at the end of the day, I think the most important thing reading fiction does is make you care. 

By virtue of the activity, you spend time learning and growing to care for another person — usually one very different from yourself. 

Isn’t that something we could all use more of? 

Aren’t we living in a time where even a little bit of kindness, a little bit of practice with empathy, feels increasingly rare? 

I’m not saying that in order to have a more compassionate, less polarized national discourse, everyone needs to read 100 books per year. I understand that not everyone likes reading, and I’m not trying to force my personal love for it onto others because I think they need to appreciate it as much as I do.

But it has an impact. Even if all you pick up this year is one novel, that’s one novel that could change how you look at someone else. 

It might not seem like it’s worth the effort. 200 pages of fiction in exchange for one moment of greater understanding, for a stranger crossing the street or a woman at the grocery store? That’s not the most enticing payoff. 

All I can say is that in my life, over and over, it has been worth it. It was worth it when my mom and I chatted together for the first time about a fantasy novel after years of silence and misunderstanding. It was worth it when that book made me have greater appreciation for her point of view, when it taught me to have forgiveness for myself after I learned to understand a character I had despised. 

I know reading isn’t always the most appealing activity. It takes effort. It’ll never be something you can do on autopilot, or with half your mind elsewhere.

But things that take effort often add value back. And if, after all of this, you give up on a novel after three pages because of the work — well, I think that’s pretty indicative of the moment we’re living in, and what we value.