Does reading books make you more intelligent/clever?

Reading books improves spelling and vocabulary. You may not think anything happens through reading, but it exercises your brain and makes the subject English much easier to understand.

I don't think it can make you cleverer as such, but it should increse your overall vacabulary, which will be helpfull for essays and CV's, and reading would be more useful than computer games, which after long houres playing, lowers your concentration span, which in turn means you don't take everything in in lectures making you less clever.

Your intelligence, imho, is your ability to learn and your ability to operate in complex situations. To do that, you need critical skills, abstract knowledge, and concrete knowledge. If you increase your skills, you will be called more intelligent. It doesn't matter a whit what your potential for "intelligence" or IQ number might be. If you read, you can exercise those skills. There are so many different things to read, I cannot guarantee that you will improve just by reading "something". You have to digest, you have to evaluate, you have to apply.

In terms of vocabulary and grammar, the type of book really helps. However, even reading a book written by a noted author doesn't mean that their style of writing, or what they're writing about, will make people more intelligent. To be sharper in terms of thinking, you should probably read a book that goes round in circles. What I mean is, a book that's controversial, and has underlying meanings. To remember information, then read a textbook. Hehe. I'm joking, actually. Reading a novel also helps with remembering stuff, but for me, I think it's more the way it's written... I don't know if it's the same for you, but there's no harm in trying. Basically, yeah, books can help you with the skills that you need, but sorry, I don't think that I can answer your title question properly. Even so, reading is good fun, and relaxing...

Hi sudhir j, Absolutely! Without a doubt! If you read from several genres, whether political, sociological, psychological, current events, history, they not only make you smarter, but you begin to see patterns emerge. You see how things converge. If you read a lot like I've done all my life, you can see how patterns, politically and sociologically emerge in societies. Reading improves your vocabulary, your spelling, but most importantly, your overall presentation. You'll learn to put ideas together and present them coherently. However, to completely answer your question, reading sci-fi or mysteries or romance is a nice to way to spend some downtime, in between "real" reading. I hope I've ignited a passion in you to read, and to be discerning about what you read.

Anything that you read will help with your general knowledge. You should at least remember one fact/piece of information that you didn't know before you read whatever it was. For example, if you were reading - say - one of Jane Austen's novels, then you'd learn something about manners and the expected behaviour of men and women of the time. If you read your next door neighbour's shopping list, then you would find something out about them that you may not have known before. Hope this helps.

No, but what reading books does is to fill your brain with knowledge. Knowing things does not make a person more intelligent, is merely makes them more knowledgable and that in the end is what most of us can achieve. A high inellect and IQ are extremely rare, in spit of what some snobs who think they are more inelligent than the rest of us, think. They're just a bunch of obsurantists who want to smother their unfounded speudoscince with black blotches so only they can read and understood what they mean. "You think you got problems with your maths, ha, you wait until you get a load of mine." ALBERT EINSTEIN - male model and mathematician

Intelligence is your brain's ABILITY to learn, so I can see why some say no. However, your language skills, vocabulary, and other skills are definitely strengthened.

not particularly, it will improve your spelling and range of words. If you read up on a particluar subject you will be more informed on it. But this may not make you smarter