GoalsAbsorption & Identification in Imaginative Literature
One of the Institute of Reading Development's primary goals across all age levels is to enable students to experience absorption and identification in imaginative literature. Absorption is the experience of imaginatively participating in the world of a book. It is characterized by those moments when the reader becomes truly lost in a book, often looking up from the page and realizing time has passed, unnoticed and unobserved.
Absorption allows for identification with characters. For an absorbed reader, the characters exist as if they are real people, dynamic and fully realized in the landscape of the story. An absorbed reader pieces together the nuances of individual characters—their qualities, motives, passions and desires—recognizing both positive and negative aspects of himself or herself reflected on the page. Absorbed readers vicariously experience the successes and losses of characters as their own.
Absorption and identification with characters are the basis of a lifelong love of reading. The repeated experience of absorption in great literature has a positive, formative influence in readers' lives.
I appreciate the focused mission of the Institute-helping students learn to experience the joy of getting absorbed in really good books. 
— Victor, Institute instructor in Atlanta & PhD Candidate in Religion