Disclaimer: This is an article that will resonate the most with the book lovers but I hope will help the ones not reading to understand why.
This is not a manifesto on the benefits of reading (even if I truly believe that there are plenty), is more a sum of possible causes why some people, including me, read so much.
source:pixabay.com
It's a habit
I've started to read when I was 6 years old. My first "real" book was "Sans famille" by Hector Malot. It become one of the books I read again and again for the next 10-15 years. At around 20, I could not read it anymore.
Reading was for me something I could do with no limits, neither to eat and do my homework. If other kids hated it and their parents would have done anything to convince them, my mother would have done anything to stop me from reading so much.
Power of example
My parents read a lot, both of them. And we had a lot of books they bought before I was born (around 300 when I first started to count and arrange them in the bookshelves). They were not very picky and we had Tolstoi and Dostoievski near Sandra Brown. So I read everything, I resonated more with some of them and less with others but I think all contributes to the way I developed.
After I finished everything at home I had a yearly subscription to the biggest public library in Constanta and each week I read the maximum allowed to take home, 5 books.
Curiosity
I had a lot of whys in my childhood so I read a lot to understand the world around me. Most of my ways were around people and why do they act as they act. I found in books an infinity of cases, behaviors and scenarios that explained me more the human nature and learned how to approach it.
Brain pause
I think a lot, on multiple frequencies, in a very short amount of time. As example, in a 7 minutes walk from home to the subway I though about the next trip and what is left to organize it, what I have to do today at work, this article and other small things. This is quite exhausting and there are only 2 ways I know of that work for me to put my brain and own thought at rest: meditation and reading.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able yet to recreate a habit from meditating (had it when I was 10-12 years old) so I am left with reading only.
When I read, all my internal resources are engaged in understanding and imagining what I read and this is quite relaxing for my multiprocessor brain.
Specific know-how needed
Maybe this should have been the first one. It's not, in my case. I've started to read very specific non-fictional books later. I enjoy them but the previous point is not met here so this books are not helping when I want to relax. Usually, after a "hard" book I need a fictional one to take the necessary pause and process the non-fictional in the background.