Rediscovering Reading

I saw a post the other day that said “Your Relationship with Reading Over Time” and it was a graph that looked somewhat like this (This is a very loose interpretation of it).

I laughed because of how accurate the depiction was. As a child, I was an avid reader. I stayed awake until 2 am with a flashlight under my covers, lost in another world, unable to close the book I had started the previous day. I chose to spend my time reading; despite the call of Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, and all the cartoons my heart could desire, all I wanted to do was read. But, as the graph predicted, my love of reading and turning pages shifted into an obsession with scrolling; my fingers no longer grabbed for a piece of paper, excited to find out what would happen to Katniss or if Augustus Waters and Hazel Grace Lancaster would live happily ever after, rather, they clicked against a screen - double tapping photos, taking snapchats with ugly filters, and responding to text messages with an unhealthy rapidity. This is normal, though. Reading wasn’t cool (although with the emergence of booktok, reading is becoming a trend… that’s a different story). So I swapped it out for something bigger and better - sepia tone squares with captions full of hashtags.

I rejected reading to an absurd level. I never did my class reading in English, opting for the simplified Sparknotes that led to an abundance of Cs on reading quizzes (to be honest they chose books like Macbeth and Heart of Darkness, so I wasn’t exactly motivated). I answered the call of TV shows and Vines sitting for hours ingesting laughter or stupidity, but suddenly, those worlds that I got lost in disappeared and I was instead sucked into worlds that I wasn’t quite ready to step into yet. I thought about things I didn’t understand and thought about my body in a way that deeply harmed it.

Like the graph again, so accurately, depicts, I found my way back to reading. It ended up being, ironically, through a 690 page book. Not exactly the most popular way to rediscover your love of reading. I was expecting to start of with Magic Treehouse and go from there. But instead, our summer reading book before senior year of high school was East of Eden by John Steinbeck. When I bought the book, I promptly looked at it, laughed, and decided that there was no way I was even cracking open this book. I was hanging out with my friend Maddie a few weeks after that and I made a joke about not doing the summer reading. She didn’t laugh and said, “Shae, this is one that you have to read. Just get to chapter 8 and you’ll be hooked.” She seemed serious. I wrote on the front cover of my book, “Maddie said get to chapter 8, you can do it” I got to chapter 8. Then 9. 10. 11. 12. 13… All the way to the end of those 691 pages. I loved that book so much I actually re-read it every year. Every time I start the book, I see that about Maddie’s reminder and I laugh, unable to imagine not finishing this book. I never got a C on a reading quiz again and my relationship with reading mended rather quickly. I began to inhale books and felt like my younger self, a flashlight under the covers and escaping into new worlds. I am forever grateful to her for that gift.

I write about my relationship with reading because while I rediscovered my love for reading a few years ago, most of my time spent reading the past five years has been assigned reading, which is great, but JSTOR articles about Total War or excerpts from Weber isn’t exactly what I would choose to read (although I did love everything I read in my sociology classes). I am now at a point in my life where I do get to choose what I read. My goal this year was to read 24 books and I am currently on book 23! I’ve really loved being able to read such a range of things - fiction, non-fiction, autobiographies/memoirs, dystopian, research etc. I wanted to share these books with all of you, since I believe:

1. there’s something in this list for everyone

2. I love giving book recommendations

3. I would love book recommendations from you

4. reading is such an important and beautiful thing that I want to share with as many people as possible

and the most honest reason…

5) Since I’m not teaching English anymore, I needed to find some way to force my love of reading on others :D

For the next few weeks, I am going to share with you all the books that I have read. I’ll share a bit about the book and give my overall rating! If you do read any of these books, please tell me because I love talking about books with people (another thing my English teacher self misses!)

Enjoy :)