The Magic of Reading Found Me Before I Knew Magic

While studying The Science of Reading recently, I recalled that I don’t remember the exact moment I learned to read, but I remember the moment I discovered what reading was. Not the letters, the sounds, or the mechanics, but the doorway. The portal. The secret passage that opened into worlds I had no business entering and yet I entered by The Magic of Reading.

As a child, reading wasn’t an assignment or a skill. It was a kind of sorcery, magic, before I knew magic. I could sit alone in bed, rocking in a chair, or with my back resting against a tree, and suddenly I wasn’t there anymore. I was somewhere else entirely, crossing deserts, exploring jungles, mushing a dog sled in the arctic, sailing into storms, crossing a raging river, meeting people or things I would never meet in my real life. Heroes, wanderers, misfits, kings, stray dogs and the entire animal kingdom. I could be brave without risk, I could be invisible, I could travel without moving. I could live a dozen lives before dinner.

Books gave me the ability to see without seeing and go without going. They let me be someone else for a while, someone stronger, faster, wiser, bolder. And in those pages, I learned that imagination isn’t pretend. It’s rehearsal. It’s possibility. It was me stretching toward the person I might become.

One moment in my life captures that magic more vividly than others.

I was an adult standing in a Heathrow Airport terminal for the first time but at that same moment a kid from a world far smaller than the one unfolding in front of me. I remember looking up at the departure board, watching the names of cities flash into place, Casablanca, Cape Town, Istanbul, Rome. Khartoum, Nairobi, Delhi, Singapore, Cairo. It felt like the whole world was shuffling in front of me, inviting me to choose a story.

And in that moment, I wasn’t standing in a Heathrow terminal. I was in a Rudyard Kipling novel. I could almost hear the hum of markets, smell spices I’d never tasted, ride the elephants or camels, outrace the dessert warriors, feel the heat and winds of places I’d only visited in books. I wasn’t going anywhere, not physically, but my imagination was already halfway across the world, running ahead of me like a child who can’t wait.

That’s the magic reading gave me. The ability to stand still and yet be utterly transported. The ability to feel connected to people I’d never met. The ability to imagine myself as someone heroic, someone capable, someone who could step into a larger world and belong there.

Reading didn’t just teach me how to sound out letters and decode words. It taught me how to dream. How to expand. How to believe that the world was bigger than the one I could see, and that I had a place in it.

Even now, all these years later, I can close my eyes and see that departure board at Heathrow. I can feel the same spark I felt as a child holding a book. The same sense that anything is possible if you’re willing to open a page and let your imagination walk through it.

That’s The Magic of Reading. It’s not just what it teaches you. It’s what unlocks what’s in you. It’s where The Science and Magic of Reading prevail.