My Reading Story
Since I was a child, my parents have always endorsed and read to me, but once I got the "power" of deciding what I wanted to do in my free time, I stopped reading since it was "boring". I developed other hobbies, like playing video games, listening to music and playing sports, in specific, volleyball, reading just stopped being present in my life.
This went on until I was around 13 years old and a friend of mine recommended me to read CHERUB. For anyone that doesn't know CHERUB, it's a 12 book series discussing teenagers or young adults being spies. I know, it's a bit super childish, but at the time I was one, and it was an awesome series to read. I remember being so addicted to the storyline that I spent an entire Saturday reading, just leaving my room to eat and even holding my bladder, so I didn't waste any time (please don't do this).
I continued to read and eventually finished the entire 12 books series, proceeded to ask the same friend for another recommendation, and so he gave me. Conspiracy 365 and once again, I was glued to it. After that series, I gave myself a chance to another book that I really didn't enjoy or intrigued me and, instead of switching to a different book, I simply stopped reading.
Time passed, and we are now in 2024. I was really into physics and space and wanted to dive deep into the matter, read from the best of the best and enter their minds, thoughts, and understandings. I decided to pick up A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
I'm going to be honest here, I'm a slow reader, and I found out that reading nonfiction, remember that this was a first, was harder than I thought. It took effort and an entire month to finish it and, at the end, I didn't even enjoy it that much. I achieved what I wanted, to understand more about the subject I wanted to learn from but, it felt exactly like that, studying. It didn't remind me of how I felt when I was 13, that intense feeling of wanting to do nothing else except reading. And that's when I started to read fiction again, and it turned out to be a path of no return.
I want to leave some of my 5 stars or top recommendations so far, so if you ever want to start reading (and share the same taste as me), I would advise one of the following:
- Red Rising trilogy (in specific the Morning Star) by Pierce Brown
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang
- The Will of the Many by James Islington
Why I Think Everyone Should Read
I think that everybody can recognize that reading is beneficial for themselves, but, as I once thought, reading can be perceived as an activity that is boring to do. If it seems and sometimes feels boring, then why have I changed my mind and am actually now endorsing people around me and on the internet (well someone is reading this right?) to do it?
Because It Can Feel Boring and Hard
One of the reasons is exactly that, because it can feel boring. I think that we live in times when everything is easily accessible and fast paced. If we are bored on the metro, we pick up our phone to distract our mind. If we go out to eat, everybody around us is staring at their screens and sometimes not even communicating with the person in front of them. If we have any questions, search for them on the internet and get an immediate answer (not saying that this is bad, it's just the reality). With AI, this is becoming even worse. Have any doubts in life? Ask an AI agent. My point is we stopped doing hard things because every single one of us walks around with an almost omniscient and dopamine hunger machine in our pockets. Things that used to feel simple, like reading this blog post, now require an extreme focus.
Reading forces you to slow down and appreciate hard things. At the end of your reading session, you will feel much more accomplished than just scrolling through a feed designed to captivate your attention span and consume you. Since I started reading, anything that required the minimum of my attention span has returned to being simple and easy.
We Are What We Consume
My view in life is that you, as a person, are what you were taught, lived and experienced. You don't know what you don't know. What I mean by this is, if you were never taught that the Earth was a globe, you would look around and think it was flat. We only know so because our ancestors worked hard, proved it and passed their knowledge and findings to us. The ability to write and read, in my view, played a huge part in this. Back then we had only two options to transfer knowledge, either by talking and hearing or by writing and reading.
The big problem faced with the hearing option is exactly what happens in the Telephone game, information will probably get distorted along the way. In the past, reading was the only way to have information transferred between multiple people or time without getting distorted. In the present, we can record audio or video in order to get the same effect, but from my experience, nothing registers the same in my brain as reading. When I hear and/or see, I can easily distract myself or let my minder wonder. Reading, on the other hand, forces my full attention to the matter at hand.
Cultivating Empathy
I'm not gonna hide it or lie, but while reading The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang I cried. I'm not going to share spoilers, but there is an intense emotional part in the book that brought tears down my cheeks. I never lived at that moment but just by reading it I can resent it. The same things happened in other books. I have felt excited, angry, sad, hopeful, tense, and many other emotions while reading. My point is that reading made me more empathic. I didn't need to live or experience it myself, I was being fully transported into the story and world described and feeling like I'd really lived it.
Books Are Awesome
You get to expand your vocabulary, enter the head and thoughts of another person/character, live experiences and feelings that you might otherwise never experience and even in fiction we can learn and grow as individuals. In summary, books are just that awesome.
Closing Words
Some final words to finish this post of mine. I think that everyone should start reading even if it is just 5 minutes per day. It's a great mental exercise. There are so many books out there, I'm sure you'll find one that you'll love and impacts your life. I know that, for me, it did have a huge positive impact on my life.
I will leave you with these beautiful words that I think describe a book perfectly.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos