Books open many doors

This week’s front page features SA-born author Roz Potgieter discussing some of the inspiration behind the successful series of children’s books she has written over the years.

She makes a number of good points about why even in the digital age, books are so important for children.

In addition to being a great way to introduce children to art and language, Potgieter said books introduced children to worlds outside of their own.

This got me thinking about the power books continue to have on children, and adults as well.

The saying “to lose yourself in a good book” is more than just a quaint saying, as any avid reader could tell you.

Since a book’s only limitation is the writing ability of its author, in the right hands a book can allow its readers to travel far more effectively than a plane ticket.

If you read enough, sooner or later you’ll find one of those books.

These are the books whose stories are so captivating, whose worlds are so enchanting that you can easily spend hours on them at a time.

JRR Tolkien’s magnum opus The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example of this. The world of Middle-Earth is rightly held up as one of the best fictional universes in the Western canon and fans have spent nearly 70 years exploring it in some form or another.

Of course books can do more than just take us to new places. They can also introduce us to new people and ideas as well.

Reading books written by authors from different cultural backgrounds is a great way to expand one’s own horizons.

Books like these can show us different ways of looking at the world and ways of thinking that might not have ever occurred to us on our own.

As the late great Carl Sagan once said: “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”