The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, day 3ish

Tereza loves books - they are her escape. So books do change people - or greet people with what they thirst for, even if they don't change worlds and societies. I would hate not to be able to read, because I read all the time, inhabiting other imagined worlds that enrich mine. I could imagine, though, being a carpenter who knew wood and its working inside out, with a great love for the sheen and touch and smell of it, and an ability to work with it and transform, and he might not read because there is enough in his craft. Or of a farmer or gardener so intimately and intelligently connected to the plants and the beasts around them that they derived complete satisfaction from the rich complexity of the things wrote therein. So maybe books are for the rest of us, who don't have a huge and great skill which we inhabit as in a different world that holds us up and subsumes us, we depend on books and reading for this enlightening other worldly transport. And, as dictatorial regimes all over the world know, if it does one thing, it makes us less biddable and more questioning.