I wish I was better at reading. Not reading and, like, understanding. I think I’m pretty good there. I always have been, it seems. Maybe not, but at least as long as I can remember. Reading feels like it’s always made sense to me. I mean…I wish I read more these days. I wish I was better at that.
I used to read all. the. time. I remember my mom telling me I needed to put my book down because we were on vacation and she didn’t want to just sit in silence. I needed to participate. THAT’S how much I used to read. I didn’t go quite to the extreme of reading books in a single sitting; I’ve always enjoyed parsing them out a bit. But, I would read several books a month, at least. A book in a weekend, perhaps, if it was really engrossing.
I lost that. School hammered it out of me, to be honest. I suddenly had to read. Books that weren’t in my wheelhouse. I like escapism. These books were about seemingly mundane things. History. Oppression. Violence. Sex. I liked space and faraway lands and mystery. ADVENTURES. So, reading those “important” books was hard for me—I didn’t look forward to them, but I still needed to read them, so they took up more and more of time and the reading lists got longer and longer until I was in college and reading was all I ever seemed to do. None of it was for pleasure. It was all I could do just to keep up with what I had to read for school. And then I never picked it back up when I graduated.
I languished. I went for a looooong time without picking up a book again to read. Like, a decade. I think it was somewhere around ten years ago when I realized just how little I was reading. And realizing that made me sad, because books were my life when I was younger.
A writer reads. Period. I’m failing at that right now. I want to do better. I’m not sure how…but I need to do better.