So what does it mean, that Peyton Place by Grace Metalious sold more copies than Sanctuary by William Faulkner? It means that reading has as many functions as the human body, and that not all of them are cerebral. One is mere entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time; another is more important, not intellectual but serious just the same. "She had learned something comforting," Roald Dahl wrote in Matilda of his ever-reading protagonist, "that we are not alone." And if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lessen human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant? How Reading Changed My Life