Every book you read lets you live another life for a few hundred pages. That’s the cheapest time travel available.

Reading puts you inside someone else’s decisions for a few hundred pages, including their era, their fears and the things they could not say out loud. You come out holding something close to experience you did not have to live through, and it costs a few evenings. Very little else available to you does that at that price.

Read one book this month from a life nothing like yours. A different century, a different country, a different kind of person entirely. Notice what surprises you, since the surprise is the part that changes how you read the people around you.