Jeanette Winterson, in her Times exploration of novelist Italo Calvino, explains why reading fiction isn’t simply important to human growth, it’s paramount:

There is a fear now, voiced by neuroscientists such as Susan Greenfield and Norman Doidge, that by training the brain on the concrete—vocational education, the simple reward system of video games and mass entertainment, the simplification of language towards information and away from metaphor—that we are breeding dull, mechanical people who cannot manage abstract or conceptual thought and who are baffled by imagination.

I can never thank my parents enough for instilling in me the desperate love of reading.