A Good Book Opens With Interest And Closes With Satisfaction
What a great truth this phrase carries: a good book opens with interest and closes with satisfaction. Avid readers know this, reading is much more than a pleasure, because with reading we transport ourselves with our thoughts and emotions to the most hidden places of the mind.
Reading makes us happy and free. In fact, as good languages claim, reading the great writers makes you better equipped to make creative and rational decisions. Because there is no doubt that, as Cortázar said, “a book begins and ends long before and long after its first and last page.”
Merging with a good book makes us more satisfied with life
Judging by a survey by the University of Rome III, in which more than 1100 participants were interviewed, it seems that readers are much more satisfied with their lives and feel happier than non-readers.
According to Nuccio Ordine, “nourishing the spirit can be as important as feeding the body”. This is reflected in a number of studies that use functional MRI to examine readers’ brains before and after reading a book. The brain feeds on the stories we read and the lessons we learn.
This is nothing new, but it is interesting to see how connections multiply between the central sulcus of the brain, the primary sensorimotor region, the primary temporal cortex and other areas related to language.
What’s more, while reading a good book, we manage to reduce stress and enhance emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, cultivating empathy and psychosocial development.
Furthermore, thanks to the fact that we can feel identified and learn to think differently, we can even modify our behaviors, understand others more easily and take lessons that can help us resolve moral and emotional dilemmas.
A good book is one that leaves marks
We cannot say that all books deserve to be read by everyone, however, we can say that there are books that delight, that hold and that carry between their covers a true intellectual luxury.
Below are some of these “must see” books. It’s just A FEW and it’s a very personal opinion, so we’d love you to share with us the titles that have marked you.
- Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevski
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
- Don Quixote da Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes
- Metamorphosis, by Kafka
- Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
- Anna Karenina, by León Tolstoy.
- Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert.
- Oscar Wilde’s portrait of Dorian Gray
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens.
- 20000 leagues under the sea, by Jules Verne
- João Salvador Seagull, by Richard Bach
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Happy World, by Aldous Huxley
- The hopscotch game, by Julio Cortázar
- The Endless Story, by Michael Ende
- The Miserables, by Victor Hugo
- The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
- The name of the rose, by Umberto Eco
- The Little Prince, from Saint-Exùpery
Would you like to recommend any more?
