Why Reading Matters

Photo shows a child reading a book

Earlier today, I internet-searched a child’s novel, “The Secret of Moon Castle,” by the late and popular British author Enid Blyton.

“Moon Castle” was the first kiddie novel I ever read (circa 1970).

As I stared at that digitized book cover, I wondered if I would still love that book. Would my favorite scene still be that chapter where the book’s kiddie sleuths hide out in a suit of armor in the hallway of a stone-built castle in England?

Or is this a better question? If I hadn’t found and devoured that book, would I have found and read Blyton’s other book series and all the books I borrowed from public libraries in Ireland and America?

And, without all my library-borrowed books, would I have grown into that teenage kid, ostensibly a (sort of) “good girl,” who, by her 19th birthday, had read three banned books? Two of those banned books (by Enda O’Brien and John McGahern) had been banned by the Irish Censorship Board. One (Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness”) got banned by the United Kingdom’s Obscene Publications Act.

Or, later, in my early 20s, would I have read my way through most of Heinrich Böll's post-World War 2 novels—books that were attacked by Germany’s conservative press, all the way to opposing his Böll's 1972 Nobel Prize?

Now, in this 2026 trip down my literary memory lane, maybe it’s not these seminal childhood moments or the individual authors or their books that matter.

Maybe what matters is this: Once, in 1970, an Irish kid found and read a novel. That novel became her entrée, her pass-through into a set of foreign worlds that sat between the pages of countless books—including the novel (set in a brick factory in present-day Pakistan) that sits by my bed today.

In those foreign or alien worlds, that kid felt—and still feels—right at home. In those worlds, she grew into a woman that, sans books and sans reading and sans public libraries, she might not have become.

Enjoyed this post? Read my two other pieces, “Can Books Convert Us?” and

“Public Libraries and the Public Good.”