If you’re fortunate, you hold in your hand a magic key that can unlock many portals. It can take you to far-away kingdoms, real or fanciful, or reveal deep truths to you, or challenge your thinking or augment it, or enlighten you on subjects quotidian or sublime.

If you’re fortunate, you hold in your hand a book.

Your bookshelf at home, or the nearest library, the bookstore you frequent, or the appropriate page on any website (including this one) that sells books, or any other place where books are to be found is a magic set of keys. The many keys to be found there are books—books of all sorts: novels, self-help, motivation and inspiration, how-to, reference, biography, history, general nonfiction, and more.

Books can unlock a world of wonder, a plethora of possibilities, an iceberg of information. You have only to open the front cover and start turning the pages. How sad that some people don’t read books, while others hardly read at all.

When I say “others hardly read at all,” I am not referring to the functionally illiterate but to those who are perfectly capable of reading but choose not to. And when I say “some people don’t read books,” I am referring to those who read—they read websites, news online, and perhaps even magazines and comic books—but not books.

I’m not denigrating websites, news online or other sources of reading. But they’ll never take the place of books. Indeed, there is a place for all. But let’s not relegate books to second-class citizenship. They are first-class citizens in both the worlds of pleasure reading and informational reading.

There is nothing quite like a book. And if you hold one in your hands, you indeed hold a magic key.

Now stop reading this blogpost and go read a book!