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The Book Life

 

I must confess that I was not a great reader as a kid. Once I had got through the children’s literature and started reading more adult like books, I would balk at reading anything too thick. I was an avid science fiction fan, but my entertainment came mostly from TV and movies. But I do remember reading Jules Verne at an early age. I read journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon. I think I tried to read 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but it was pretty “thick” and I don’t think I made it very far. By age 11 or 12, I did not know much about contemporary science fiction. I only knew about the old classics (or things that they had made movies about).

As I got older, I would occasionally try something big and impressive. I read Frankenstein, and I confess I didn’t get much out of it my first time through. It was more like I was just reading it so I could say I read it. There were several books like that. In Junior High I read Catch-22 and there were a lot of parts that went right past me (except for the naughty bits).

By the time I got to college I had matured enough, or maybe my vocabulary had grown enough that I could now understand the tomes that I sped through or spurned in my younger days. Reading some of those books a second time, I got a lot more out of them. And now I graduated to other books, not necessarily important books, some of them were books no one had heard of, but I was reading them for fun, not just to tick one off a list, but because I enjoyed them. That was new to me; reading just for fun. From that point on. My reading became a passion.

Some years ago my wife and I were talking to a woman and one of us mentioned a book that we were reading. The woman went, “Ugh, I can’t stand reading. It’s so boring. Why would you read when you can just watch a movie?” Books offer an inner world that movies cannot, but clearly, there was no winning that argument with this woman. And yet, when I was fifteen, I might have said the same thing. And how many others in the world feel the same way in this age of instant gratification, where even classic movies are ”too slow” to keep the interest of some people. I count myself lucky that I learned better.


Star Liner

Comments

  1. SangCasterApril 3, 2024 at 6:07 AM

    Hi
    Thank you for writing this post
    I enjoyed it (It was my first English blog reading, and I had a little problem with some words, but I got help from Google Translate for them!)

    I can feel what you said in this post and my life was like this. but I liked fantasies more.
    when I was a child, I borrowed a book from our village's library, that was the third book of a series, named "Deltora Quest". I liked it a lot and I read it several times, cause in the library I didn't find any other books of the series. I thought about it a lot and I made other stories in my mind.
    Now, I like reading a lot, and I can't watch movies or series that much (like most of my friends or my family). I can't feel anything with TV shows at all! When someone asks me: "Why you read this much instead of watching the movies?" I don't have any good answer for them, but really I can't explain the way I live inside the books and their words!!!

    I hope you and your wife read a lot together and enjoy all of it.


    By the way, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Catch-22 didn't write in Italic as names of books, like other ones.

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