My bookish journey

Ahh! The Magic Tree House - The Knight in the Dawn! Yes, finally, you’ve been waiting a whole day for Mary to finish it. You grasp it in your hands, beady little eyes already skimming the cover, impatient to start reading it. You are in Grade 3, having just transferred to a new elementary school, your only place of solace is in the vast library that is open all day; much to your delight! Oh, that’s the teacher calling, better run!

So when did you start reading? Well, the earliest case that you remember encountering words is in daycare. Your parents had a busy work schedule and dropped you off at a daycare program afterschool each day. Not knowing a single word of English (you had just come back from China), you waddled behind the teacher as she jabbered away to the other children in rapid lingo. You don’t want to brag about being smart, but you did pick up the language fairly quickly and easily. Soon, you were speaking English so fluently that you were admitted straight to Grade 1 without taking the ESL test. This opened a door into a world that you previously could never have imagined. Letters formed words, which formed sentences which formed stories which are written in books. Books! Books!

In Grade 4 you discovered Harry Potter. Well, actually, back when you were in China, your aunt used to read Harry Potter to you in Chinese (If you recall!) It was like discovering your name for the first time. My name…is Harry! (just kidding) Now, H.P. was not an easy book to read, your brother struggled with it until… actually, you don’t think he’s ever picked it up, yikes. However, you found it to be perfectly to your taste. You treasure these books more than your phone (now that’s saying something). You were quick to throw aside Geronimo Stilton (mind you, they were colourful and funny, but a bit too simple of a read for a grade 4 don’t you think?) in favour of The Thief Lord, the Inkheart Trilogy, Charlotte’s Web and The Tale of Despereaux to name a few.

In grade 5 your teacher, bless her, encouraged reading by rewarding it with ice cream! All you had to do was read a book, fill in two pages of activities/questions about your book and for every 15 books you read, you got to make your own ice cream sundae and eat it while the class does work. You also got stickers to stick by your name on a chart. I must have logged over a hundred books by the end of the year. The 3 students with the most books by the end of the school year could choose a book from a pile of books the library doesn’t want anymore. Score!

You cried and laughed your way into grade 8, growing taller and happier. Your head is now full of books like The Hunger Games and The Divergent Series. As the year go by you dig deeper and deeper into YA and by the end of grade 9, you’ve dug yourself a decent, comfortable home to burrow in for the winter. Sure, there were other genres you have yet to discover, like the dreaded classics (ugh) and non-fiction (nope). And so you stick to your unwavering love for young adult fiction until one day in class your teacher announces that you will be reading Pride and Prejudice as the year’s novel. You go into the unit with wariness, trying not to fall in love with Elizabeth’s wit or cringe at Lydia’s unfortunate activities, and trying not to laugh at Mrs. Bennet’s passive aggressive remarks and sidestepping Darcy’s amazing level of haughtiness. But you are ultimately trapped, as you write with feverish delight about Elizabeth’s idea of love and marriage on the final paper, you know then that you’ve missed out. Big time.

Flash forward to today. On my to be read shelf you would see Orwell (Down and out in Paris and London), Dickens (Great Expectations), and Tolstoy (War and Peace), but also V.E. Schwab (Vicious), Sarah J Maas (Queen of Shadows), and Jandy Nelson (I’ll give you the Sun). I have since widened my reading horizons and liked almost everything and anything. But being a reader is not easy. First there’s the bookworm thing, isn’t that an insult? Why am I being compared to a worm that chews up books? I’d say that there is quite a distinguishable line between swallowing a book in a figurative sense and literally chewing up a book. Then there is the issue of having people who don’t read sneer at you for having a book (or books) in your hands. I guess it’s similar to video games. But the main problem of being a reader is the fact that you can’t say “I read for a living” unless you are a professional critic. Society (namely my family) wants me to have a job that would benefit the community in any way and me reading books isn’t going to cut it. So with the pursue of other more “useful” activities (piano, math, non-profits) my time for reading has dramatically decreased. So much so that I have resorted to reading at the weirdest nooks and crannies of time during the day. My wish is to read every book in the world. Sounds childish doesn’t it? But I really hope that it’ll come true.

Thanks for reading!