Amar Ekushey Book Fair 2026: My Perspective on Why I Read

I am willing to read books as long as they inspire me. And I want to see more book fairs, and interact with more readers and writers. But why? Well, there are various reasons. Reading a book gives me pleasure and it turns out to be something that generates my inner joy. On the outer dimensions, I read as it enables me to interact with others. I can bridge the gap that exists between ‘me’ and ‘other’. This gives me a hybrid feeling of becoming a ‘we’.
I think when readers read a book, their experiences vary depending on their tastes. For example, I get a sublime joy from seeing a page of familiar equations, and a mathematical universe unfolds in front of me. Some may have looked for some explanatory sentences and inspiring thoughts. Still, others may say that they are not trustworthy if the genre is a biography. John Updike, for instance, thinks that ‘most biographies are just novels with indexes’. By this, he means that biography as a genre cannot be trusted. Updike suggests that ‘it looks like fact, it has indexes, but it is really more often than not partial, unreliable, and made up’.
Physicist Paul Davies once said, “Imagination is the key to enjoying good literature. But it is also the key to good science, to extend my imagination for writing”. I sometimes read poetry. Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. While poetry gives us a new world, which is unseen to us, and we get a new taste of it, fiction can give us ‘words’ that can be used like a drug. Hence, Rudyard Kipling said, “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”.

In my case, these words influence my hundred trillion connections of neurones that fire between eighty-six billion neurones that I know I have in my brain as per science. This is the reality. Richard Dawkins mentioned, “Science is the poetry of reality. It provokes and simultaneously soothes our existential terror of deep time and intergalactic space, our bafflement in the face of evolved complexity…above all the brain itself, the only object in the known universe capable of even trying to understand itself”.
There are many reasons people spend some money and move their eyes across someone else’s words, which means, read books. Jonathan Haidt, an American psychologist and writer, mentioned the three emotional reasons for reading a book. First, there is the psychological state known as ‘narrative transportation’. This means the state of flow we get into as readers when the real world becomes inundated with daily activities such as email, to-do lists and shopping, and we try to get away from it and want to feel refreshed with a book. Second, there is the emotion of ‘moral elevation’. This means that great writing can trigger uplifting and educational moral emotions. Here I can recall Thomas Jefferson, who believed that well-written fiction is often more powerful than less skilfully portrayed non-fiction. Third, there is the emotion of awe that a great book can bring to us. Haidt suggests that a wide variety of experiences count as awe as long as they have two features: the perception of vastness and the experience that cannot be accommodated within one’s current mental structure and that structure must be changed, expanded or rebuilt.
I read non-fiction because it gives me more perspective. When I finish a non-fiction book, I see a new perspective on reality. Fiction for me is like a mirror, which reflects my internal world of emotions, thoughts, grievances, anger or happiness, while non-fiction is like a lens that looks outwards. We see the rest of the world through the lens. Obviously, it depends on the power of the lens and the part of the world that we are looking at.
My favourite Italian physicist and science writer, Carlo Rovelli, once raised questions – why do we breathe? Why do we chat? Why do we look around us? And his answer is that we are ‘curious critters, thirsty to know, see, learn, discover, enlarge our sight, our vision, our world’. We never lose what Albert Einstein called ‘a holy curiosity’. Curiosity, memory and literacy are the characteristics of the human species. Reading is the activity that replenishes all three. However, reading with the intention of interrogating the text and critically assessing what is being disseminated has become more urgent than ever in the age of the internet. We are now living in a world of communication that is full of fake news, conspiracy and misinformation. We need to approach the written text critically and extract what illuminates our passion. So, these are the reasons why I read.
This year, the Bangla Academy Amar Ekushey Book Fair 2026 is set to begin on 20 February 2026. I would like to suggest book lovers to go to the book fair. Buy a book, stop for a moment and feel. Let yourself try every word and be carried away by the emotion behind it, and like me, you will soon realise that reading is a habit, an addiction, an affliction and a necessity. 

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The writer is a UK-based academic who writes on science, philosophy and education