According to an article in The New York Times, most book sales have sagged, yet romance, science fiction, and fantasy novels are booming as “customers embrace happy endings and escapism.” It’s easy to understand why in this time of recession as the media endlessly cranks out bad news; as those foundations in our own lives once thought sturdy and reliable have had to be almost totally reinvented in some circumstances, leaving us shaken.

As long as it’s temporary it’s good to escape—healthy, even—a relief to leave all the current gloom of reality behind for a little while.  It’s easy to grab a book and lose yourself in a good plot, and a lot cheaper than a much needed but expensive vacation. Since you can read almost anywhere, books are a portable getaway.

Reading is more stimulating than watching a movie in that it excites your deepest imagination: What faces do the characters wear? What do their voices sound like? What are the sights, sounds, and feel of their world?  No one can capture the truest dimensions of those things for you quite like...you.  

Good logic, all. But get real. Are we wasting our precious time when we read? There have been moments I’ve caught myself feeling a bit guilty when I’ve chosen to pick up a book rather than do something else I would deem more “productive.” There are only so many hours in the day. So little time, so much to do...blah, blah, blah...really, now—except to make us feel different for a little while, to send us to an imaginary world, what real good does reading do? Well, I think I may have hit on something...

You can find many different definitions for the word “imagination.” Most of the sources I found are simple: “...the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses...” But by far the most compelling of definitions came from a Princeton site. It called imagination a resource: the ability to deal resourcefully with unusual problems; "a man of resource"

This stirred my thoughts. What if, by using our imaginations, we are really exercising a deep, inherent power? What if all those games we played as children—you know, the ones we made up after we’d bugged our mothers for something to do and they said, “Go use your imagination, for Pete’s sake.”—were actually training us how to be resourceful in adulthood? Of course they were. By making a stick horse out of a broom, we were using our own minds to utilize our surroundings in a productive way. In modern times it’s called “thinking outside the box.” But that’s all it really is, all it ever really was—imagination. Which, in turn, is an integral part of reading.

If that’s the case, then anyone—a youngster, especially—lost in a book, is certainly not wasting their time. On the contrary, they’re spending their time rather well, honing their mind's eye into a higher level of resourcefulness—a skill, in fact, and one best learned at a tender age since it places those who possess it at a distinct advantage throughout life.

But I believe that reading is good for everyone of all ages, for whatever reason: business, education, pleasure, exercise of the mind, or—and maybe best of all—as an escape from reality for just a little while.