And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality.

Words, just sometimes, can set you free.

I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.

Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.