I’ve forgotten the details of every book I’ve ever read. Within a month, the anecdotes are gone, and soon after, a vague theme is all I can muster. For years, I’ve been trying to figure out why we keep coming back to books. If you’re looking for entertainment, a movie is shorter and a video game is more fun. So why read?

For awhile, I thought that I read to become better informed. With each non-fiction book, I could grow in wisdom, learning about the history of humankind or some celebrated figure. Fiction could fill my head with cultural references and make me the life of any intellectual party. But I found that whatever I tried, the important details were dripping from the leaky bucket of my mind. I tried doubling down with retention strategies: cue cards, highlights, notes, essays. Still, nothing stuck. I started to think that perhaps reading was a waste of time.

Nevertheless, a habit drilled into all good children by teachers and family does not die easily, and I kept reading, albeit somewhat halfheartedly. I tried audiobooks, which put less pressure on what I took away, as listening while I commuted or did laundry asked so little of my time. I thought less about getting shining anecdotes from a biography or life-changing advice from self-help. I just read, and gave myself a little space from trying to make my reading as “productive” as possible.

An idea started forming while I was listening to Obama’s A Promised Land. It’s an excellent audiobook in which the former president takes you inside key decisions of his campaign and presidency. I can’t give you much more fidelity on topics covered than that, but what I can remember is how the book made me feel while I was reading it. When Obama described a packed day of meetings followed by hours prepping in his study for the next day, I felt invigorated to push my own work harder.

A good book is able to create a “reading bump” that lifts you higher while you read it. When my commitment to researching a career down the road in climate technology was wavering, I read Ministry for the Future, a turbulent environmental sci-fi book. Each description of humanity’s climate hardships and triumphs in the decades to come propelled me during early mornings spent researching the industry. Thinking in Bets helped me be decisive enough to move past a relationship with someone who was great, but wasn’t right for me at the time. The Defining Decade pushed my friend over the edge for trading his comfortable setup on one American coast for the unknown of the other.

Those experiences highlighted for me two advantages that reading has over other media. First, a book holds you under its spell for weeks while you read it, unlike a medium such as film that is over in hours. Second, reading is active compared to the passiveness of other art like TV shows. With literary fiction for example, the reader uses her imagination to fill gaps in the world and its characters’ psychologies.

This active, prolonged participation in a world other than your own has the power to change how you act and feel. I’ve seen this not only in my own reading, but also in the results of scientific papers. In one study, social psychologists observed that children who read literary fiction as opposed to popular fiction or non-fiction exhibited a higher ability to understand others’ mental states. (Kidd and Castano) This reading bump can be quite pronounced while engaging with a book, but may very well continue in subtle ways afterwards.

So while I’ve lowered my expectations for what knowledge I will carry forward with me after finishing a book, I now expect more of how one impacts me while I read it. How do I want to feel and act these next few weeks? Empathetic? Inspired? Decisive? There’s a book for that.

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