'Reading Gives You an Opportunity to Understand'

 

"I see things on Twitter and the news that are just so fundamentally different from what I think and believe. And I don't want to not understand my fellow Americans--I want to understand. Reading gives you an opportunity to understand someone else's perspective, no matter how much you disagree with it.
I wish that everyone had the opportunity to try to inhabit someone else's experiences for a few hours, and literature is a great way to do that. Books are especially useful because the depth of engagement that someone has with a book allows them to really stay with it and to spend some time with that different perspective.
I wish I could give all of my friends and family members I have arguments with a book and say 'read this and tell me what you think!' They may not end up agreeing with me, but they might understand a bit better where I'm coming from."

--Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, in an interview with the Chicago Review of Books

 

via Shelf Awareness