Several reasons for extensive reading have been given on here. For example, what some people get from books seems much better to them than what they can get in real life!
I quoted some wise words on the subject from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in an article about books versus real life:
“The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race.”
I recently came across something that reminded me of these words, but in connection with writing rather than reading. This is an extract from Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott:
“For a novelist, the real world falls away and the world of the novel takes on a vividness and fascination that can’t be matched by people or happenings in the pale, ordinary, slow-moving actual world. The characters of the imagination seem to have a mysterious claim on the writer’s time and attention.”
The real world does indeed disappear when we are immersed in a book, whether as reader or writer, and the novelist Elizabeth Goudge said something to the effect that she much preferred her own characters to people in real life.
For some people, creations of the imagination are more real than the real world.
