There is a reason that we cry when we read an emotional book, laugh when a joke delivered in text is done perfectly, and cringe from embarrassment when our favorite character does something that we would hate to have done. Art imitates life, and the more deeply we are willing to see our lives reflected in the literature that we are reading, the more we can learn from it. It does not matter whether one seeks to find his or her own problems in the writing, find a model on which to base his own writing, or learn how to interpret types of people she does not come across in day-to-day life. Literature, if we are willing to let it, can change perceptions on countless aspects of our own lives.