I love consuming media. I am a movie aficionado and enjoy playing video games.
But reading has never been my jam. I skirted my way through high school by just skimming the books we needed to read. I struggled with history classes because of the amount of reading necessary. I just could not focus. I would read a sentence and think about something else. I would read a paragraph and forget what I had just read. I would then tell myself to just read the whole page and get it done, and I wouldn’t retain anything. My brain just wants to do anything else besides reading words on a page.
Then, during my senior year of high school, I took Senior English. It was one of the biggest blow-off classes I have ever taken. I think we needed to read three books and write three papers. There was no teaching; it was literally just reading your book during class time. With my hands tied, I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t distract myself by being the class clown; I had to actually read a book.
I couldn’t tell you what the other two books I read were. I feel like one was very short and was recommended to me by a friend who said the teacher said it was okay. But the book I actually do remember is Ender’s Game.
Ender’s Game was recommended by my locker mate, who had read the other books in the series. Apparently, it is a pretty crazy series now.
I sat and read the book each day until I hit the twist—the third-best twist of all time, according to this random list. I can still remember where I was and the feeling I had. I looked around the room, almost like I expected everyone else to be as astonished as I was. I then went back a few pages to confirm that I hadn’t just missed something, since I am familiar with spacing out while reading. I then went even further back because I didn’t think a book could be this awesome.
During my freshman year of college, I had to read some more. I finished Fight Club, but I still struggled with older texts. Trying to read old English-type words made it even harder for me to focus. I also felt the books were pretty basic, with themes and metaphors that were easy to understand. I kept expecting that reading a famous story would make me appreciate the art even more, but it was just reading.
As a computer science and math major, I didn’t have to do much reading, and I liked that. Even when I did my teaching work, there wasn’t much more reading. However, after college, I really started to like reading self-help and financial books.
I enjoyed learning about things I didn’t learn in college. Some of the books haven’t aged well, but it isn’t always about the exact words of the text. It’s about their meaning and how they show you a world you haven’t seen before.
I started to learn about finance and economics and learned that calories in need to equal calories out. I would tell people, “I only read nonfiction.” I didn’t deny consuming media in other ways, but for some reason, I felt that if I was reading, it needed to be to improve myself, not to enjoy myself.
Then someone recommended “Project Hail Mary” to me. I told him my usual thing, and he said, “No, I get that, but this book is different.” I hemmed and hawed for a few weeks but ultimately decided I should try it. I was hooked. I read the entire thing in probably a week.
I had broken the spell. I was now mixing books like Ready Player One and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow into my normal nonfiction-only daily reading. I am now really enjoying the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and am excited to learn how many books there are to be consumed.
There are books out there for everyone. Don’t gatekeep yourself. Enjoy books!
