I jumped on this post too late to engage into a discussion (I guess) but I steel feel the urge to write few lines about what reading means to me.

Since I was a child I always felt very attracted to stories, to ancient myths and legends. My father used to sing to me and my sister before going to bed, he used to sing some traditional songs from our region but also some more famous songs...songs of heroism, love, death, pride and sadness. When I grew up a bit, I started reading a lot, particularly novels well suited for children and in those books I found again the stories I liked, the happiness and the sufferings that I experienced also in my real life as a young adult. And my peers always considered me a bit of a strange guy, never had true friends and never had that spicy stories that little boys used to have during those years.

Then came a dark period, where I convinced myself that I had to change my attitude, to start acting like a normal dude. Not even knowing what normality was...I just extrapolated a template for normality from the average school mate behaviour and then started acting accordingly. Several years went by and I can now say they were the worst years of my life. I lived a lot of situations, had friends, had parties, met girls. I never read a book in probably 6 years, I completely suppressed my soul just for the sake of being normal. It turned out that normnality is both intangible and overrated, everything came out nonsense and th result was a sharp increase of my bitterness in relationships.

I then understood that killing my tendencies, feelings, attitudes was the worst choice ever and from that moment on I started rediscovering what I was, what I am. This is not an easy task...undestanding yourself is difficult, but trying to extract again your soul from the ruins of lies is way more difficult. I still am searching for that soul.

I'm now older (but younger than you expect, probably) and sometimes I feel that the years I dedicated to being someone else are the only years that I wasted, everything else was worth it, being it before that period or after it.

As long as it makes a better human being, it's worth it. Seeing life through the eyes of Raskolnikov, D'Artagnan, or the characters of Hemingway is enriching, it increases the domain of situations you're exposed to and gives you more tools - even practical tools, if you look close enough - to navigate through life.

I'll be forever grateful to literature for it, even though I've not been a good disciple.