"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere"

Reading is a journey that transcends boundaries, both physical and psychological. Through stories, we step beyond the confines of our immediate surroundings, our culture, and even our personal experiences. Every time a reader opens a book, they are invited into a new landscape with unfamiliar rules, traditions, and perspectives. The familiar comfort of home is traded for the exhilarating uncertainty of foreign settings, vivid personalities, and new ideas. In this sense, books act as vehicles of migration, carrying us away from what we know.

Yet, the real gift of reading is not merely to escape our own world, but to discover a profound sense of belonging in places that seemed distant and inaccessible before. As we invest ourselves in the lives of fictional or historical characters, we learn empathy and understanding; their homes, struggles, and triumphs become meaningful to us. The experiences of others echo with universal feelings and dilemmas, and we see ourselves reflected, even in the most unfamiliar of situations. Reading bridges divides, transforming the alien into the familiar.

Ultimately, literature is not just a passage out of the self, but a passage into many selves, a means of finding fragments of home wherever we go. Through words, the homes of others become ours: the fields of rural Ireland, the bustling streets of Lagos, the solitary attic in Paris. The connection transcends mere entertainment, reaching for a deeper communion with the world and with humanity. The lived experiences within stories foster a sense of kinship and recognition, regardless of geography or time. To read, then, is to expand the territory in which we feel at home, to continually grow comfortable in new worlds, until the feeling of being an “immigrant” is replaced with a recognition that our home can be as wide as the collective imagination of all who write and read.