Gayle Brandeis, On Reading

"Reading creates compassion. It lets us see the world through the eyes of the Other, and helps us realize that the Other isn't so Other after all--we all have a human heart, with all its fallibility, all its potential grace."

{Gayle Brandeis is the author of several books, including Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novel The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. Her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt), was published earlier this year. Visit her website here for more information.}