Every book you read alone adds a room to the house inside your head. Some days you’ll need somewhere to go.

Reading leaves something behind that is yours to go back to. A story you have been through properly becomes a place you can visit when the real one is hard: a landscape, a voice, a way of thinking you can borrow. Nobody can take those rooms away, and nobody else has the same house, because yours was built out of whatever you happened to read.

Start one book this month that nobody set for you, and finish it. Give it twenty minutes a night rather than waiting for a free weekend. Keep the ones that mattered where you can see them, because you will want to go back.