For the love of reading! Celebrate National Reading Month in March

Jenn Slone, Access Director
·3 min read

Everyone loves spring. March brings us longer days, more sunshine, colorful blooms, and birds and bugs crawl out of their hiding places. Makes me want to take a book out to my hammock, or to lay a blanket down in soft grass and read all day. And since March is National Reading Month, it would be wrong for me, as a librarian, to deny that call.

National Reading Month kicks off on March 2 with “Read Across America Day.” On this day, schools, libraries, and people throughout the country join forces to read together and to celebrate the love of reading.Here at the library, we know that reading is more than just a hobby or a quiet pastime. Reading is a powerful tool for making us smarter, sharper, more mentally healthy, and for improving our relationships with others.

When you read, you engage brain functions like phonemic awareness, processes for sight and sound, comprehension, fluency, and increased concentration. Mentally stimulating your brain regularly can help slow down Alzheimer’s and dementia. Consider regular reading like exercise for the brain. The more you read, the stronger and healthier your mind will be.

Reading also helps reduce stress by allowing us to escape into another world. For folks who struggle with anxiety, focusing on the words in a book can be a balm for the brain. Regular practice of reading helps develop techniques to detach from our anxiety – at least for a brief time – by escaping into a new mental setting.

You might not think that reading books can improve your relationships with others, but reading is great for building empathy. Literary fiction, for example, allows us to empathize with a variety of characters’ emotions and behaviors. It gives perspective, allowing us to see life from other angles, and it increases our compassion.

Here are a few ways you can celebrate National Reading Month this March:

  • Read a book!

  • Read to a child or another person.

  • Take turns reading poetry out loud with a friend or your significant other.

  • Visit the library and check out a book!

  • Support the local book store with a purchase.

  • Claim some books from a Little Free Library near you.

  • Donate your old books to the library for an upcoming book sale, to stock the Little Free Libraries, and for distribution on our mobile library, the Bee.

If you need a good book, I know just where you can find one! Our libraries offer robust collections of adult and children’s fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, magazines, and loads more. We have nine library locations throughout the county, plus the Bee and two BookHives, where you can place holds in the catalog and then retrieve your materials 24/7, even when the library is closed. Information about each branch, the Bee and BookHives is available at CRCPL.org/locations.

Online, we provide access to eBooks through hoopla, the Ohio Digital Library (Libby app), Comics Plus, and more. Visit CRCPL.org/elibrary for those resources. All you need to access them is a library card. Sign up for one at CRCPL.org/librarycard.

Jenn Slone is Access Director at CRCPL, where she makes sure that library patrons have the tools they need to find the books they want.

This article originally appeared on Chillicothe Gazette: For the love of reading! Celebrate National Reading Month in March