Books That Inspire - How Reading Changes Your Perspective
Updated: Sep 6
When you read, for a little while at least, your mind steps away from whatever is happening in your own world and settles somewhere else.
Into somebody else’s life. Another time. Another country. Another way of thinking.
I think that is one of the quiet gifts of reading.
We often talk about books as entertainment, education or escape, but perhaps they do something else as well.
They give us the opportunity to look at life from somewhere other than where we are standing.
And sometimes, that changes us.
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one." - George R.R. Martin
Seeing Through Someone Else’s Eyes - How Reading Changes Your Perspective
Every one of us sees the world through a perspective shaped by experience.
Family. Childhood. Relationships. Work. Loss. Love. Success. Disappointment. The things we have been taught and the things we have discovered for ourselves.
It is very easy to assume that the way we see something is simply the way it is.
Then we read.
A character makes a decision we would never make. Someone describes an experience we have never had. A philosopher questions something we have always accepted. A memoir allows us into a life completely unlike our own.
For a few pages, we borrow another person's eyes.
We don't necessarily have to agree with what we find there. In fact, some of the books that have made me think the most are those that have caused me to stop and think... I'm not sure I agree with that at all.
But even disagreement asks something of us.
Why don't I agree?
And perhaps more importantly: What do I believe instead?
Reading Can Make Us Question What We Think We Know
I have always been curious about why people believe what they believe.
It is probably why my shelves have collected such a strange assortment of books over the years — philosophy sitting beside spirituality, novels beside psychology, history beside ideas about consciousness and what it means to be human.
One book leads to a question.
The question leads to another book.
That book leads somewhere completely unexpected.
And suddenly, an idea you have carried around for years doesn't seem quite as certain as it once did.
I don't think that means we should abandon our beliefs every time we encounter a convincing author... quite the opposite.
Reading gives us somewhere safe to examine them.
We can turn an idea around in our minds. Question it. Challenge it. Keep part of it. Reject the rest.
And occasionally admit that perhaps we were wrong.
There is growth in that.
Books Give Us Distance From Our Own Lives
There is another reason I think reading can change perspective.
Distance.
When we are caught in the middle of something — grief, anger, uncertainty, family problems, work problems or simply one of those periods when life feels rather too loud — it can be difficult to see beyond it.
A book cannot necessarily solve what is happening.
But it can interrupt it.
For an hour, perhaps, our thoughts are somewhere else. And when we return to our own life, we sometimes return with a little more space around the problem.
I've had moments when a sentence in a book has made me stop.
Somehow, the words reached into something I had been thinking about and allowed me to see it differently.
I suspect many readers know that feeling.
You close the book for a moment and stare into the distance because something has just shifted.
The Person We Become Between the Pages
Perhaps this is what fascinates me most about reading.
We don't remain exactly the same person throughout our lives.
We change through experience, certainly, but we also change through the ideas we encounter.
Some we reject.
Some we forget.
Some stay with us for decades.
And some arrive at precisely the right moment, and alter the direction of our thinking.
Looking back at books I read years ago, I sometimes wonder whether I would interpret them the same way today. Probably not.
Because the reader has changed.
A book may remain exactly the same on the shelf while the person opening it becomes someone entirely different.
Perhaps that is why rereading can be so interesting. We notice sentences we barely registered the first time. Characters look different. Ideas land differently.
The book hasn't changed.
We have.
A Thought to Take With You
Think about a book that has stayed with you.
Not necessarily your favourite book or even the best book you have ever read.
Just one that made you stop and see something differently.
Did it change what you believed?
Did it help you understand somebody else?
Or did it simply give you a different way of looking at something happening in your own life?
Perhaps reading changes our perspective because, for a little while, it reminds us that our view of the world is only one view of it.
And there are an extraordinary number of others waiting between the covers of a book.
Namaste
Deb xx
Thoughtful writing across life, mind, and meaning.
P.S. I first wrote about this in 2023. Coming back to it a few years later feels rather appropriate. The more I read — and the more I write about what I read — the less interested I am in simply reviewing books and the more interested I become in the thoughts they leave behind. Perhaps that, in itself, is proof that reading changes our perspective.
Explore Deb Eternal's Book Library to discover some intriguing books I've read. I update the list as frequently as possible, so it's continually evolving.
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