I feel that we read to learn new things, sure, absolutely, but more often than not, what we really get out of the good books we read is self- recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn't know we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And this self-recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing and a little more connected to the larger world.