The thing I think about most when I consider why I read is not entertainment or information but a specific experience of access. Books give me access to interiority — to what it feels like to be someone other than myself, in circumstances I haven't experienced, in times and places I can't visit.

This is what film mostly can't do. Film shows you surfaces. Literature, at its best, shows you what's happening behind a face. The interior monologue, the free indirect discourse that puts you inside a character's perspective without fully separating it from the narration — these are literary technologies with no close equivalent in other art forms.

I read because I'm not satisfied with only knowing what my own interior feels like. That sounds like a deficiency and I think it might be, but the books help.