Why we need to read the book

April 23 is the date chosen by UNESCO to celebrate the book, in fact it coincides with the day of death in 1616 of three writers who are pillars of universal culture: Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare and the Spanish poet Garciloso de la Vega.

“He who reads will have lived 5,000 years: he was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired the infinite … because reading is a backward immortality.”

So wrote Umberto Eco, and it is a sentence that encapsulates the meaning of reading. Because reading means entering into the lives of others, empathizing, discovering and knowing. To laugh and cry through the eyes of those characters who lived in another era, in another world. But it also means finding oneself and recognizing oneself in stories and tales. Above all, it means knowing and learning.

Susanna Tamaro wrote.

“Reading, after all, means nothing more than creating a small garden within our memory. Each book brings a few elements, a flowerbed, an avenue, a bench on which to rest when we are tired. Year after year, reading after reading, the garden turns into a park, and in this park, someone else may happen to be there.”

Each year a world capital is designated to this day. This year the choice fell on a Malaysian city, Kuala Lampur, which has made a strong commitment to making culture a commodity for all citizens, as accessible as clean water.

The health emergency, restrictions and lockdown encouraged even more reading. So many books were taken from the shelves and re-read on those days when everyone was forced to stay home. So many paper books and so many digital ones. According to the data, paper books still remain, however, the ones preferred by Italians, who for 89.83 percent prefer them to ebooks.

Being able to flip through the pages of a text, underline or simply smell the paper for many, gives more incentive to read. The indispensable scent of paper and the pleasure in physically flipping through pages are themselves integral parts of the act of reading.

“Reading a lot is one of the paths that lead to originality; one is the more original and peculiar the more he knows what others have said.” (Miguel de Unamuno)