Why do I read?

I am jealous of my wife's garden. Well, not really the garden per se, but the pleasure that she gets out of working in the yard. When I told her that about my feelings she replied that I read books. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. I have never really thought of reading as a hobby. It's something that I have to do, like eating or sleeping. She's right in that I get pleasure in reading, but is that all that I'm getting when I stay up late to finish just one more page? What's the point of spending so much time with a book when I could be doing something a little more, uh, active (or at least working on getting my waist smaller)?

I have not been able to identify a specific instance when I pulled some little nugget from Linchpin or some other book that gave me the solution to a tricky problem. I have been entranced by Scientific Genius, but that has more to do with comparing my research experiences to the descriptions of the discovery process described in the book. Nobody could read Flow without thinking about their own life and having the contents of the book color their experience for a few weeks afterword.

Thinking about what will happen after the initial impact of Flow wears off helped me figure of what I get from all of my reading. The effect isn't something as direct as applying this fact to this situation. It's more of a layering of different insights, experiences, perspectives, facts, thoughts, and biases over and into the experience of my daily life. Everything I read changes the way I think about and experience the events of my life. The impact of each book is complex. Every book's impact will vary, but every one of those pages that I stay up to read gives me something back for my time. Some people converse, some people go for long runs, some people grow flowers and vegetables. I read.