How many hours do you spend reading books?

Read more, live longer. Really!

Doris and Dick Goodwin, by Deb Colby, from An Unfinished Love Story, my all-consuming Memorial Day weekend read.

What is it about a long holiday weekend that makes me want to curl up with a book and read the whole thing in one sitting?

Actually, I almost always want to do that, but the schedules and demands of daily life usually make it impossible. Over a long holiday weekend, though, especially one like Memorial Day, just past, when there aren’t lots of other obligations, it gets a lot easier.

Opening a book — an actual book, printed on paper, rather than one on a screen — is one of the great joys of life. I read to escape, to go places I’ve never been. I read to remember, to feel something. Sometimes I read to figure out what I think — or to feel a connection to other people and their stories.

As C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Turns out, reading books is great for a lot of reasons beyond the obvious ones.

In 2016, researchers from Yale asked 3,635 adults over 50 years old how much time they’d spent in the last week reading books. They divided the participants into three groups: those who didn’t read at all, those who read books up to three and a half hours and those who read books for more than three and a half hours.

Then they followed them over 12 years and found something astonishing: Book readers lived an average of two years longer than those who didn’t read at all.

“Older individuals, regardless of gender, health status, wealth or education, showed the survival advantage of reading books,” said Becca Levy, a Yale professor of epidemiology and psychology and a leading researcher on all aspects of aging. Her book, Breaking the Age Code, explains how what you think about aging can actually help you live longer. (Yep, it’s in my to-read pile.)

Levy said that reading books involves two cognitive processes that might explain why book readers live longer: The slow, deep immersion that you need to connect to a book’s content, and the way books promote empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

Amazing.

So what, you might be wondering, did I read over the Memorial Day holiday? 

A delicious piece of history of the Sixties by one of my favorite writers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is 81 herself now. This latest book, An Unfinished Love Story, is a fascinating exploration of the life and times — and opinions — of her late husband, Richard Goodwin, along with an intimate look at the marriage of two of the towering intellects of the 20^th Century.

Dick Goodwin was a speechwriter, policy advocate and lawyer who seems to have been involved in — or at least adjacent to — nearly every significant historical moment of the country’s history in the late 20^th Century, from John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960 through to helping write Al Gore’s concession to George W. Bush after the traumatic 2000 election recount. Early in his career, Dick Goodwin was a staff lawyer for the U.S. House of Representatives Legislative Oversight Committee that investigated fraud on the popular television quiz shows of the day; you might remember the movie.

Doris, slightly younger than Dick, knew she wanted to be a historian and professor but also spent incredible time with President Lyndon Johnson, especially after he left the presidency under the cloud of Vietnam in 1968.

The book is built around the months Dick and Doris spent opening boxes to examine memorabilia and relive episodes from his colorful life — the cigar box that Che Guevara gave him! A broken police club he picked up after an altercation at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968! — but it’s the conversation between the two that make the book so memorable. It’s a dialogue between two absolute life partners, both with their own experiences and opinions, becoming closer as his life draws to an end.

Whew, didn’t mean to go on so long about just one book. Obviously, I loved it.

Next up: The Paris Novel, new from Ruth Reichl, author, journalist and the former editor of one of my favorite magazines, the late, great Gourmet. I’m already halfway through.

What should I read next? Summer seems like a great season to add a few more years to my life.