Many people say that after something very important happens in their lives, they feel different. It is like a new awakening. They feel their lives have changed and this could be for better or worse. When something bad happens to you, you learn from it. You say to yourself the best common phrase: it will not happen again. But when something good happens to you, you want to experience this situation over and over again. This also happens when you read a book. If reading a book makes you feel that you need to keep reading it, it is because this book is changing your perspective or point of view. Maybe you can get curious and wonder: Why is this book making me feel this way? I have the answer: This is how literature works. It can make a positive change in your life; it can fill a vacuum. This is why I think literature is the best way to improve your life.

        Literature improves your life because it appeals to people’s inner nature; it goes beyond their surface. For instance, if a man is a drug addict or a woman is a prostitute, people judge them because of the things they do but they do not take a minute to think about why these people are living the way they are living. Thus, the main thing about studying literature is getting closer to the whole story, not just browsing over what people see at first sight. In order to do this, you have to take into consideration William Long’s words “…When we begin the study of literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description”. To illustrate his quote, he means that after you realize you are enjoying a book, you will be able to analyze and describe how that book can mean something relevant to you.

        To be able to get to your inner nature, you have to put into practice the exceptional phrases or sentences that made “click” at the moment of reading them. Arnold Bennett made a very strong and honest comment about this. He said: “The man who pores over a manual of carpentry and does naught with it is a fool”. That is to say that it is not just reading books; it is translating books into your real life, making positive changes by doing something with the knowledge they give you; do not let them be covered by dust in a bookcase-it will be a waste of your money. Besides, if you want books to become into a part of your daily life, read them as much as you can. Why? As Arnold Bennett put it: “…no book of great and established reputation is read till it is read at least twice”. In other words, when you read a book once you can lose some important aspects of the book because of the heat of the moment, the excitement of reading the book that everybody is talking about. Maybe the story you are reading at that moment of your life is not related with you but when you read it again “Oh”! You found it very interesting and accurate for the moment you are living.
         It is important for you to read. But read about stuff that can make a change in your life. Do not get distracted by those big headlines or picture magazines that are in terrible need to catch your attention. As Henry James said: “ …and the picture magazine (above all), who keeps screaming, “Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time”. They are desperate of attention and that is the reason why they use pulp images and simplified information. As a matter of fact, they want to do the work for you: Not letting you exercise your mind, to make the effort to create something in your head. They give you something to be entertained with, something that you need to be “well-informed” about what is happening around you, something readable, easy to interpret. But what they do not realize is that the information they give you is forgotten quickly due to the fact that you do not engage with it, you just read it to kill time.
        On the other hand, books do not fight for attention like magazines or newspapers do. They prefer to put into practice Gandhi’s concept of “Satyagraha” (It is a combination of the concepts of noncooperation and nonviolence). Gandhi made an important statement about how people react when they compete with others. He said: “Nations have fought in the manner of the brute. They have wreaked vengeance upon those whom they have considered to be their enemies”. If you translate that statement into the literary world, it means that books do not give magazines and newspapers a taste of their own medicine; they do not compete in order to wreck them. They just wait peacefully to awake someone’s interest and being read.
        “Stop being someone ordinary; become someone extraordinary”. A dear friend always says that. How can you do it? Take Arnold Bennett’s words as an example: “…Open a great book in the braced spirit with which you would listen to a great man”. Listen carefully to the words you read, translate them into your life and get ready to make some improvements in it through the wonderful world of literature.