There's that book on your bedside table: it's been there for weeks. Months, even. But you still haven't gotten round to reading it. Ok, ok, you were doing your schoolwork, then you were cooking, then you just had to watch that new movie on Netflix - you're just too busy. 

Not anymore. 

Let's face it: we're in a global pandemic. We're in lockdown. You're not going anywhere, and you're not in any rush. It's just you and your house. And that book that's on your bedside table, which has been there for weeks. Months, even. 

Reading is a comfort that is suprisingly easy to provide ourselves with. Just open the book, flip the pages and you're there: in any world that you choose to be. Books can teach us how to fall down a rabbit hole and entire another world; how to receive a letter from a magic school and become a wizard; how to be deemed the perfect 19th century bride (just take it from Jane Austen) - but most of the time, they teach us a lot about ourselves. 

You might think that a book is simply an object with a few boring sentences scrawled inside, but if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Books are actually guidebooks on how to be human, written by other humans. They teach us how to love, how to forgive and how to move on. 

Take Wuthering Heights, for example. Emily Bronte might have written the book in 1847, but I'm sure we all think of Cathy and Heathcliff when anyone says, "whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same". And maybe  love worked a little differently back then, but it did teach us all something pretty important: if the love of your life marries another guy, don't marry his sister just for revenge. It's not gonna work out. Just take it from Heathcliff and Isabella. 

Curling up with a good book on the sofa after hours attached to your screen doing online work is the perfect way to end the day. Switch Maths equations for Gatsby and Daisy's love life, Physics formulas for detective Philip Marlowe's adventures, and Spanish verbs for the Bennet's. 

They'll leave you closing the book with a 101 thoughts to keep you thinking for 101 days straight. They'll provide you with a distraction that is so desperately needed right about now. 

After all, as William Nicholson once said, "we read to know we're not alone".