Has anyone mentioned escapism yet? I think that without my love for long books in my freshman year of high school, I probably would have gotten really depressed. Sometimes a novel is the best, even the only, way to get away from your own life for a couple of hours. It lets you just zone out and forget your own worries. :)

Other than that, what you guys have said about morality questions in books is so true. Quite often a novel will make me wonder what was going through the author's head, why they wrote that. You can gain so much from just realising the motivation for a novel. It makes you think that "ok, this person has written a book about bullying (for use of a cliche example) so obviously, bullying is a problem." And then you start to think about times when you've been in a situation similar to that in the story, and you wonder how else you could have acted then. A novel can make a huge difference in things like that. Even questions you'd never really thought of before can be answered in a novel.