On World Book Day: Why Reading Matters

Photo shows a child reading a book

Earlier today, on World Book Day, I internet-searched a child’s novel, “The Secret of Moon Castle,” by the late and popular British author Enid Blyton.

“Moon Castle” was the first kiddie novel I ever read (circa 1970).

Today, as I stared at that digitized book cover, I wondered if I would still love that book. Would my favorite scene still be that chapter where the book’s kiddie sleuths hide out in a suit of armor in the castle’s hallway?

Or maybe the question to ask is this: If I hadn’t found and devoured that book about British children getting sent to spend their school holiday in a spooky castle, would I have found and read Blyton’s other book series?

And, if I had not read those, would I have found and devoured the Nancy Drew mysteries?

And without all of these, would I have grown into that teenage kid, ostensibly a (sort of) “good girl,” who, by her 19th birthday, had read three banned books? Two of the books (by Enda O’Brien and John McGahern) had been banned by the Irish Censorship Board. One (Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness”) had once been banned by the United Kingdom’s Obscene Publications Act.

Or, later, in my early 20s, would I have read my way through most of Heinrich Böll's post-World War 2 novels—books that were attacked by Germany’s conservative press, all the way to opposing his Böll's 1972 Nobel Prize?

Today, in my 2025 trip down this “what if” memory lane, maybe it’s not these seminal childhood moments or the individual authors or their books that matter.

Maybe what matters is this: Once, in 1970, an Irish kid found and read a novel. That novel became her entrée, her pass-through into a set of foreign, contrived worlds that sat between the pages of countless other books.

In those alien worlds, that kid felt—and still feels—right at home. In those alien worlds, she grew into a woman that, sans books and sans reading and sans libraries, she might not have become.