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.
Hi
ReplyDeleteThank 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.