"Read everything you find on your way, the street signs, the shops..." That's what my grandmother told me when I was learning to read and today, 45 years later, I still do it.

Why read?

The need to read is a dogma that children have in their heads. We must read to learn, to succeed in studies, to inform ourselves, to know who we are, where we live, where we are going, to know the memory of the past, so as not to repeat the nonsense of grandparents, to escape, to find meaning in life, to save time, to take advantage of previous experiences, to illuminate our present, to understand the foundations of our civilization, to feed our curiosity, to distract ourselves, to inform us, to cultivate ourselves, to communicate, to exercise our critical spirit. 

...and why in silence?

«Strange disappearance of reading aloud. What would Dostoevsky have thought of this? And Flaubert? Do we no longer have the right to put words in our mouths before sticking them into our heads? No longer heard? Is there no music anymore? Is there no saliva anymore? Words no longer have flavor? And what else! Didn't Flaubert yell at his Bovary until his eardrums burst? Is he not the best person to know that the understanding of the text goes through the sound of the words from which they get all their meaning?», Pennac wrote.