A friend recently turned me on to this incredible book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Not long ago, in an Atlantic cover story he penned, he posed an important question for our time. “Is Google making us stupid?”

The book very thoroughly discusses the evolution of intellectual tools and technology and, with compelling scientific data, more than suggests that the technology we incorporate into our daily lives actually causes our brains to permanently adapt. Availing ourselves to the technology of the Internet, Carr maintains, actually makes our brains operate differently. The benefits of the omnipresent WEB, with immediate access to windfalls of information, needs to be considered along with the pitfalls. We are losing our ability to read lengthy pieces of writing and dive into the zone of deep thinking, a mindset that requires time and concentration.

Of course, the question about our cultural propensity for immediate gratification over anything that might require time and renewed intention merits more serious thought than I could try to unpack now. But I have to say The Shallows has prompted me to contemplate the importance of reading books. For me, reading magazines or web-icles or even screen readers carrying books, can’t approximate this experience.

I can appreciate books on culture and philosophy and can value other books as instructive, but I have a special love for novels. My favorite books, the most timeless works I have read, and have often re-read, achieve a kind of truth that feels more truthful than the accurate accounting of a situation. Novels teach us empathy and faith, courage and will. They help us look at ourselves as characters in our own stories, full of gifts and dreams, and, if there can be such a thing, sacred flaws.

It’s not just the stories, but it’s books themselves that I love. Each book, with its different weight and cover style, page size and typeface — everything about a book contributes towards making a unique experience. And each book I read demands something precious of me. Books demand my time and they require care in handling. While reading a book, that book occupies a special place in my consciousness. Frequently, I will remind myself that I can’t leave it on a bus or drop it on the street. Books demand respect for our relationships, for whatever term that may turn out to be. While reading a book, I feel I have been entrusted with its care.

And now, titles of some of my favorites come to mind; books I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about, or books that I can still talk about thirty years after I first read them.

In my teens and twenties, I loved Pride and Prejudice, Steppenwolf, Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, The Good Soldier, Clockwork Orange, Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pale Fire.

I was in a book club during most of my forties, enjoying animated discussions after reading many best sellers and classics, and I occupied my time with many other books I will never forget: Stones from the River, Herzog, A Hundred Years of Solitude, The Fifth Business, Middlesex, Mrs. Dalloway, The Liar’s Club, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.

In recent years, I have found unexpected delight in following up on recommendations from surprise sources, people I have met on airplanes to guest speakers from TED talks, relishing my excursions into Infinity in the Palm of her Hand, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Freedom, The Bastard of Istanbul, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

In The Shallows, Carr describes how our brains initially had to adapt to the new technology of the written word. “To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call ‘the still point of the turning world.’”

Getting lost in a book, especially a novel or well-researched history, planting yourself in an author’s world, a world made possible through his or her discipline, and then to co-imagine a different life experience altogether – one page at a time – is no small thing.