We read not only with our eyes, but with our hearts. Every sense is in play. We shiver with fear, weep, laugh aloud, blaze with anger, are seduced, aroused, enchanted. We read with our senses of taste and smell, with skin and brain and intuition. We read intellectually, emotionally, erotically. We read in order to understand our lives, to become what we are not and through this to question what we are. For a few hours we enter the minds and bodies of lovers, criminals, artists. We are insiders, present as latitude is defined or Anne Boleyn murdered. We enter the minds of explorers and scientists, even though we may not be able to do the maths. Ages fly before us, and we step on to other continents. Our identity shifts. We understand other languages, even if we do not speak them. We live in 16th-century London, or Hogwarts. We run on the moors with Cathy and Heathcliff. We are watched by Big Brother, and sense our own weakness in the face of implacable totalitarianism.

We take all this for granted. It starts in early childhood with stories of princesses forced to sweep floors or trains that have faces and are jealous of one another. On it goes, from Peter Rabbit to Narnia, widening and deepening until we find our own footholds in the flood of words.

To me, it always seems one of the most astonishing things that human beings do, on a par with dreaming, dying and giving birth. We can use a written code to open to one another the intricate whorls of our minds. Every thought or emotion, no matter how complex, may be contained in words. No rhythm, however subtle, will be missed by the reader’s ear, which stumbles on a clumsy sentence and yields to the pull of perfectly judged pace.

Reading has the power to name and define experiences that would otherwise remain incommunicable. Without words we remain locked within the islands of ourselves, but by reading we create bridges that join us. Every news bulletin is crammed with our terrible gift for misunderstanding one another, and the violence that springs from it. Differences are magnified. Books are banned, or burned. In Nazi Germany it was forbidden to read Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or the children’s adventure story Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner. Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was banned in Ireland. DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow was banned in London in 1915; four years later he left England, never to live there permanently again.

Censorship can be erratic, even funny, as well as terrifying. Why was The Wizard of Oz banned from Chicago’s public libraries in 1928? Why were Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales banned from being mailed by the US Postal Service? Whatever else such censorship may represent, it is a tribute to the power of reading. Meanwhile, readers are determined to get hold of the books that authority has decided to suppress. Books are copied, smuggled and concealed. People take astonishing risks in order to read freely, and suffer penalties ranging from social shame to death. Book are subversive: they have to be. They subvert any idea that the world can only be “read” in a single way, according to a single theory of government or religion. They are as obstinately various as the human beings who read and write them.

Readers go their own way, and this is what frustrates governments and tantalises publishers. You can drag the reader to the water with the most brilliant advertising and marketing campaigns, but you cannot make him or her drink deep of shallow words.

No one can define the quality in a book that makes it command passionate loyalty from readers, and while some bestsellers are predictable, others have leapfrogged every idea about what readers should love. This is where physical bookshops and libraries are so important to readers, in spite of the convenience and ease of making an online purchase. We need to be able to see all the books that we don’t know about yet. Bookshops encourage browsing, dawdling and discovery. They open byways that become high roads to new fields of understanding. They don’t nag; they suggest. To be a reader in search of a book is more than to be a shopper who already knows what he or she wants to buy. Bookshops and libraries are places where books and readers come out of the private world, and make their claim on the public space. They say, visibly, how important books are to us.

Only rarely does the widespread passion for reading show itself dramatically in public. It happened in the midnight queues for the latest Harry Potter, and in crowds on the quays of New York in 1841 calling out to passengers who had read the latest instalment of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “Is Little Nell dead?” Sailors cast out rope while the fate of a child who had never existed was bawled from deck to dock. Fiercely, peremptorily, readers demanded their rights: they had given themselves to the story and must know the ending. Dickens was almost alarmed by his own celebrity, hard as he worked to gain fame. When he toured the US, crowds flocked to see him. As he wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton from Boston in January 1842:

I can give you no conception of my welcome here. There never was a king or emperor upon the earth so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained in public at splendid balls and dinners, and waited on by public bodies and deputations of all kinds.

This may sound like every author’s dream, but Dickens’ slightly boastful amazement soon gave way to exhaustion. Meeting the author may be a mixed blessing for readers, too. Disillusion lurks. This person has created characters whom we know down to the bone, love, hate, argue over, mourn, and yet ... With some relief, we return to the page. And so we read on, while the barrier between past and present dissolves and the timeless reality of the book asserts itself. Here I am, it says, to be made again whenever I am read.