Why I Read

Reading will increase your vocabulary, without you even realizing it.
Reading will make you more informed and more aware of the world around you.
Reading builds neurons and synapses and actually increases your brain power.
Reading will enhance your knowledge and your understanding of the world, and will give you something to talk about at parties. This, in turn, will make you sound more intelligent and less egocentric and will help you get laid.
Reading will make you a better writer. And being a good writer, will help you get better grades in all of your subjects. Later, reading will make you stand out from the hundreds of others applying for the same job you want, and will increase your likelihood of getting that job.
Reading, by virtue of making you more intelligent and more aware and informed, and a better writer and communicator, will help you, after you get that job you want, to be promoted faster and to climb the ladder of success more quickly than your nonreading colleagues.
Being a reader, will help you make more money.
The person who can read but doesn't, quoting Mark Twain—even if you haven't read anything of his since grammar school—has no advantage over the person who can't read.
In other words,  if you can read but don't, you might as well be illiterate.
That's something you can chew on for a while.
Reading will sensitize you to the human condition, even if you haven't lived long enough to know what is meant by the human condition. Plus, even if you believe that you are plenty sensitive already, and have already amassed an entire universe of sensitivity. Even if you believes you may be the most sensitive person alive.
Reading a good novel, like watching a good movie, takes me to places I have never been and might never go. Although watching a movie—say, The English Patient—does allow me to experience the harsh beauty of the North African desert or the hushed tragedy of the Villa San Girolamo hospital room, it does so in only two dimensions, and so keeps me outside of those places, a spectator looking at a flat picture that moves.
Reading Michael Ondaatje's novel, on the other hand, puts me into that world, allows me to feel the desert's desiccating heat, the sand fleas and gritty sand in my socks; sucks the moisture from my tongue and nostrils, stings my eyeballs, and sears the soles of my feet. Reading drops me down into the hospital room where Almásy lies bandaged, grotesquely burned. Reading fills my nose and mouth with the putrefying scent of decaying flesh. It puts me so close to beautiful Hana's tears that I can very nearly reach out and wipe them from her cheek.
Reading, will startle your senses alive again by throwing open the world when your small, cluttered rooms have grown tight and stale.
Reading will lay a hand on your shoulders when you are homesick, or when your heart has been broken, or when that C-minus seems like the greatest tragedy in the world.
Reading, can keep you from cutting yourself, can keep you from suffocating in the quicksand of your self-absorbed despair.
Reading, can turn on the lights in your darkness, can help you see yourself more clearly, can help you find yourself when you are lost.
Reading, (this is something that cannot be taught but must be learned), can make you feel like not one lone cell stranded in the desolation of the world, but one of eight billion cells conjoined by the world, all hearts echoing the others in the song of one enormous heart.
Being a human is a lonely, lonely business and that only a couple of things can assuage that loneliness. Loving someone is the best remedy. Making music is good medicine too. And so is reading, another form of love—an act of faith and trust and desire, an act of reaching out and of coming together.