What makes reading worthwhile?  

“Reason is by study, labor, and exercise of logic, philosophy and other liberal arts  corroborate and quickened; and the judgment both in them and also in orators, laws  and stories much ripened. And although poets are with many men taken but for  painted words, yet do they much help the judgment, and make a man among other  things well furnished in one special thing, without which all learning is half lame . . .  a good mother wit.”  - St. Thomas More, from A Dialogue Concerning Heresies  

We should aspire to be readers of books, endowed with the habit of reading.  

“Not the one hundred greatest books, or any of those they think they ought to read,” as John  Senior puts it, “but whatever good book is at hand; and beginning with it, come not just to  like it, but to know it and to love it – and then rightly read another and another.” The  seminal works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas require an imaginative soil  enriched not just by Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Twain, but also by Aesop, Andersen,  Mother Goose, and the Brothers Grimm. Because what is great builds upon what is good, it  is worth our while to read rightly many good books.  

In no more than 500 words, write an essay defending the worth of a worthwhile book you  have read and explain what made it worth your while.