When you need to step outside yourself for a bit, get a book

Hesse encapsulated the transformative nature of reading in his 1930 essay The Magic of the Book: “Among the many worlds that man did not receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of books is the greatest… Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.”

-From a new collection of people reading around the world, by photographer Steve McCurry, and featured in BBC Books.