The Book Wench

I have always loved reading, as long as I can remember. I genuinely do not remember a time where I didn’t love looking at books and learning the words I was reading.

My earliest memory is of reading a baby book at around three years old, a book about a rabbit trying on a bunch of hats for a beach trip with her family.

From there I graduated to toddler books and then chapter books around the age of five or six. At around seven I was reading Nancy Drew and I have the distinct memory of asking my grandmother to teach me some of the words in the first Nancy Drew book (I couldn’t have told you what a Titian-haired girl was then). My point is, I feel like I have always been reading.

As I got older, the books I read changed and the voracious way in which I read the books grew. I devoured them like a woman starved. I couldn’t get enough.

Summers were my favorite. No school, just me and books all summer long. Plus I got to participate in the local library’s reading contest (I won a couple of times). You couldn’t beat the summer reading program. It was the best.

But now I’m much older and I still read with a certain level of voracity but that wasn’t always the case. Undergraduate studies in English really robbed me of the joy of reading and that loss was further compounded by the loss of my mother, my first and loudest reading advocate.

In fact, I stopped reading altogether for a few months until I picked up Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (which I loved until I realized the problems that it brings to the table).

As it stands, I’m reading again, but not as voraciously as i once was. Age and my ADHD has really curbed my appetite for reading or, rather, made it harder to concentrate. Furthermore, working on my Masters has, once again, made reading a little difficult to enjoy because of the sheer amount of prescribed reading I have completed in the last five years (I have been taking my Masters slow because of work and sickness).

Nevertheless, I have a massive, planned TBR for after I graduate in a couple of weeks. I will take a couple of days rest from reading (maybe) and then dive right in.

But all this planning got me thinking. Why do I read. Why do I love it so much. Why are books such balm to me?

I think, like many people, I love the escape. The way that books can take me away from my real-life troubles and worries and just make them disappear. I read to learn, to share, to hope, and to enjoy, as well. But there is something more to it. There is just something so entirely beautiful about the written word in and of itself.

A lush passage, or well-chosen word is just so enthralling, so exquisite, that it sometimes can give me goosebumps. There is just something so auspicious and grand about reading that I don’t think I will ever be able to adequately describe.

I want to start annotating books outside of the school setting going forward. I want to mark the passages that transport me or bewitch me. I want to be able to casually flip through the pages long after finishing the books and find once again a page or passage that blew me away the first time I read it.

I love living a bookish life. I am so grateful for my mother’s determination in making me a bookworm. I don’t know if I would love books as much as I do if she hadn’t tried so hard from the moment she found out she was pregnant to ensure I would love reading. I’m eternally grateful to her.

My only hope is that one day my own writing can inspire others in the way that reading inspires me.

Why do you read?