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Have you ever cringed with embarrassment and squirmed in your seat because the character in your book is going through a particularly mortifying situation? Or felt your heart being ripped out bit by bit and had difficulty breathing because you are crying so hard all because of a situation your character is going through, in a book? Words have the power to move us to tears, to make us laugh out in joy, and to make us sigh in pure relief. Books make us feel; they make us into compassionate creatures. They have the power to change us and that right there is magic. Isn’t it amazing that you get to live through someone else’s imagination because what are books if not imagination? See the world as it was inside the mind of someone, turn a few pages and there you go tumbling into a different world. From the works of Jane Austen to Pierce Brown; see the world and the society as it was a hundred years ago or how it could be in a hundred years in someone else’s imagination. I feel that one lifetime is too short for me to experience everything that I want to experience and do all the things that I want to do so instead, I live vicariously through the pages of the book. I’ll let you in on a little secret, for me books are just a portal that I can escape into anytime I want. Trust me, reading is fun and if you think it isn’t you just haven’t found the right book yet. I grew up with reading books as my favorite hobby. Once you get into it, it’s almost addictive. When everyone else would be out playing or running around I would be busy with books, running away from reality and into a place made up of words. There is just something magical about the idea that the most mundane looking words, fit together into a page and those pages can hold an entirely different world. And you can pick and choose what world you want to dive into. Aside from all the magical stuff, reading books improve your vocabulary, improve your writing skills, and you also gain some kind of knowledge outside of your daily courses. For example, I learned that if you are a cop and when chasing a convict, you never point the gun straight ahead when you are about to turn a corner. The gun is always glued to your side because if the gun is pointed first, it’s easier to get it knocked off. They always show it wrong in the movies. I know how Quidditch is played, and lots of unnecessary details about Greek and Roman gods. I learned that it’s okay to be lonely sometimes and to say no to the wrong thing. Even some books on fantasy and fiction genre can provide moral and general information. Unlike watching a movie, when you are reading books, you read line by line about the character and quite literally get inside their minds and you become someone else. Each decision and judgment the characters make and how they handle a situation they are thrown into; a reader feels everything, experiences everything.