King captures something we miss when we simply praise reading as "educational" or "entertaining"—he's pointing to the almost alchemical way a book transforms whatever mundane space surrounds you into somewhere else entirely. Unlike a film that demands a darkened theater or a painting that anchors you to a gallery wall, a book slips into your pocket and performs its magic in waiting rooms, on trains, in the margins of ordinary Tuesday afternoons. A nurse I know reads Victorian novels during her lunch breaks in a break room that smells of microwaved fish, yet for those thirty minutes she's somewhere entirely other—and that defiance of circumstance is precisely what King means by magic.