“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian Wood”

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

One of my most prized possessions sits snugly on a bookshelf in the guest room/office of my home.

I found it in a used book store in South Haven several years ago: an early edition of “All the President’s Men,” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Woodward signed it for me when he gave a talk at Alpena High School several years ago.

I already cherished the book, but that signature made it mean even more.

You see, Woodward and his book changed the whole direction of my life.

I saw the movie based on the book, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, in the 10th grade. I first read the book (a copy I’d checked out of the Battle Creek library) shortly thereafter.

Written in the third person about the authors’ work as Washington Post journalists covering the Watergate scandal and coverup, “All the President’s Men” reads like a detective novel but shows the real-life power of a free and independent press.

I’d always known I wanted to be a writer of some kind. Even at a young age, when I wanted to be an archaeologist and then a marine biologist, I always said I wanted to do those things and then write about my experience.

But “All the President’s Men” settled it for me. I had to be a journalist.

Books have the power to change lives.

That’s why I’ve always loved March, when schools around the country celebrate Reading Month.

When kids read books, entire worlds open to them. They can imagine themselves living in new and exciting ways, and that can inspire them to fight to live that life.

Books can transport us out of our own lives and take us places even films and music — both powerful media — cannot, because books require us to use our own minds to form the pictures of the stories, and that allows us to create dreams tailor-made for us.

We can see ourselves in the stories we read more easily than we can see ourselves in stories we watch or hear.

I’ve learned along the way, too, that the more you read, the better you can write.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, first with Dr. Seuss and those Little Golden Books filled with Disney stories. Then characters like Amelia Bedelia and the Boxcar Children. Then Gary Paulsen and all his adventure books and Frank Peretti’s Cooper Kids series. I got into Louis L’Amour for a while at the suggestion of my grandmother, and finished most of his Sacketts saga one summer.

I think I was in middle school the first time I read Ernest Hemingway (“The Sun Also Rises,” I think it was), and then I quickly gobbled up all I could find of his. Hemingway’s “Islands in the Stream” stands as one of my favorite books. I usually read it once every summer.

Middle school introduced me to other classics, like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker and Harper Lee and Truman Capote and Charlotte Bronte and Jack Kerouac. I don’t care for most Dickens books, but, for some reason I can’t quite put a finger on, “A Tale of Two Cities” is my favorite book.

By the time I’d decided I wanted to be a journalist, I started reading a lot more nonfiction, especially political stuff. “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Into the Wild,” by Jon Krakauer, “This Town,” by Mark Leibovich, and “The Price of Politics,” by Woodward stand out as some of the best nonfiction I’ve read, though many other titles have informed and enthralled me.

Around the time I settled on journalism, I also discovered gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who quickly became my favorite writer not because I agree with everything he said or did — I don’t — but because his writing is so kinetic he makes segments on delegate counting fly off the page.

Busyness has slowed the pace of my reading, but I’m still at it. I just finished “Killers of the Flower Moon,” by the journalist David Grann, and am now reading an Abraham Lincoln biography by Jon Meacham.

I’ve got a book going at any given time.

Each and every book I’ve read has shaped me in some way, whether I’ve lifted some small piece of style to incorporate into my own writing or broadened my mind with some new piece of information I hadn’t before considered or the book compelled me to dream a dream I hadn’t before dreamed.

Books have power.

Celebrate them this March is Reading Month by picking up a title you hadn’t considered before and just seeing where it takes you.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.