Life is serious and serious literature can help people through it. That's the message of Jane Davis's remarkable Get into Reading project. Jane Davis's Get into Reading project is one of two main strands of work undertaken by The Reader organization, at Liverpool University. In 1997, Jane and two other continuing education teachers, Sarah Coley and Angela Macmillan, launched "The Reader," a quarterly literary magazine aimed at "confident, literate" people who already have a passion for reading and perhaps want to stretch themselves further. The organisation grew out of the magazine. Get into Reading, part of the organisation's participation programme, aims to take books to people who, for whatever reason, don't read, though usually they can. In this article, the author takes a look at the project's impact on the lives of those who became part of it.