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Reading: Good for Your Brain, and for the World

By Flickr user 0olong
I love to read. Aside from the obvious benefits of reading, like entertainment, having something to do on the subway, and an impressive bookshelf, reading stimulates your mind and keeps it from decline in old age. And now, by reading books, you can help improve the world!

Sound a little farfetched? Well, take a look at two organizations I love, Better World Books and BookCrossing.

Better World Books (which also has a blog I happen to like a lot) "collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide." That means for each book you buy from them—used or new—a portion of the profits go to fund literacy projects around the world, and they ship it with carbon-neutral offsets. So far, they claim to have raised over 4 million dollars for global literacy, and saved over 11 million books from sitting in a landfill.

BookCrossing is a site that allows you to share your books with complete strangers, and lets you track where they've gone! By registering with the site, you can donate books for other users to read, leaving them on a plane, your local coffee shop, even your orthodontist's waiting room. Other members will see where you've left the book, read it, review it on the site, and leave it in a new place. As the BookCrossing people say, help make the whole world a library by reading a book and passing it on!

Thus, the perfect solution: buy a (used) book, stimulate your brain, pass it on, make the world a better place. Can life get better than this?

This entry is by Alison, who works with our Community Outreach Team. She also blogs at Idealist in NYC.