“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… "
Reading soothes, entertains, humors, educates, thrills, and through them we travel to foreign places, and the past. Through reading we learn to empathize, relate, draw parallels with the human condition, and most of all widen our perception of the world around us. Different from the visual media-based culture that is encompassing our lives, books provide us a mechanism to combine our previous perceptions and knowledge with new ideas and character stories easing us into expanding those ideas and perceptions. Alternatively, the visual media-based outlets spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to “market” to you to keep you watching. The wonderful, but sometimes overwhelming, pleasure of working behind the circulation desk is seeing so many books that have the ability to expand my world view, challenge me, and even sometimes "touch a nerve". Through reading each of us can walk away gaining something different from the same book. The National Book Foundation su