My story is one that many share. I was an avid reader as a child. My love for reading began when my dad read Harry Potter to me while I was in elementary school. In middle school, my nose was buried in books. I would read while walking between classes and while on the bus to and from school. The first thing I did upon returning home was to sit on the living room couch and read until dinner time. I remember attempting to read A Tale of Two Cities in the seventh grade and giving up, but it didn’t diminish my love for reading.
In high school, things changed and priorities shifted. Somewhere along the way, I stopped reading, not only for leisure. I Sparknote’d most of the required readings for school, and although there was always a place for reading in my heart, there was never an effort to recognize it. The closest attempts were reading short stories from r/nosleep or infrequently finding random ones online. This continued into my life. I remember my 2021 resolution was to get back into reading and I set a realistic goal of twelve books in a year, or one per month. Not only did I end up reading zero books, I didn’t even check out or buy a single book to read.
In July of this year, my girlfriend wanted to read the Harry Potter books again and asked if I would like to join her. I agreed since the desire to get back into reading was always present. I had a blast. Since then, I’ve read 25 books and created a TBR well into the hundreds. I’ve renewed my old hobby and discovered a new one of browsing through Reddit and BookTube to find book suggestions. I’ve been a massive lurker for the past couple of months, checking daily for new books to someday read. I bought a Kindle for Black Friday.
I’m aware that I’m preaching to the choir but reading is absolutely magical. It transports you into a different space and time, it lets you explore the depths of human emotion, and it’s a place to lose yourself to the wit and creativity of others. I’ve had multiple 5 star reads, and my two most recent reads were both beautiful and mind-altering. The Sirens of Titan taught me the importance and value of love and One Hundred Years of Solitude showed me the depth and complexity of the heart.
I’m so happy to be reading again and wanted to share. What was your experience and journey of reading? What was your opinion of The Sirens of Titan or One Hundred Years of Solitude? What are your recent 5 star reads?
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As a librarian’s daughter, I’ve always been a mad reader. Living overseas in the 90s though, I had to read whatever used books in English were around, which were either Penguin classics (published in India) or fun trashy novels other travelers left around, so it was a steady diet of Grapes of Wrath and Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire books! Grad school knocked out novel reading for a while for me, but I bounced back 😁
I think two American classics that get overlooked are James Dickey’s Deliverance (because everyone thinks they know what it is about – nope) and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which is amazing.
Right now I’m reading Edith Holler by Edward Carey and I am simply blown away – the narrator is a 12-year-old girl in a Shakespeare theater in Norwich in 1901 who is under a curse, and the narrative voice is perfection, I’m slowing down reading it because I don’t want it to end!