What do you people read? What is it that tickles your fancy and makes you wish days were long and nights yet longer? In short, what makes a reader cli—well, grow cross-eyed and drop drooling onto dog-eared, creased pages.
I’ve often heard said: “No, I don’t read that. I like adventure and comedy, perhaps some romance, but I don’t read politics or tragedy.” Or the other way around, someone would say: “You read romance? That’s so childish. One should read truly intellectually stimulating books. For example, did you hear of (blah-blah-blah)? It’s non-fiction. Literature of the wise, if you ask me.”
Well, I ask myself, how does a person truly become wise if he/she insists on keeping their sphere narrow, on always being inside the box?
When I started reading, I couldn’t digest anything more than short, and I mean really short, narratives. I didn’t have the patience for anything else. Then a senior (not that old, I think in retrospect) told me that I was a kid and of course I couldn’t handle big books—she read Enid Blyton compilations. Suffice to say, I didn’t take that well. Always I’d had an itch to transform and grow, picking bits and pieces that I liked from others’ personalities and incorporating them into my own. And I didn’t like the thought that though I read, I didn’t look scholarly enough because I didn’t read a big book.
From there came a time when I was told I was a child since I didn’t read novels because of course novels were what adults read. I started reading longer books, again Enid Blyton—I was something of a fan; it crushed me when I found out she had died. I scoured the school’s library for her books until, one day, it was made apparent to me that there weren’t anymore. I’d read them all.
I thought, why not go further? Why stick with a single writer? And I tried my first novel thicker than the width of a thumb. A friend lent me Warriors by Enid Hunter. It was those cats that made me realize good little children fighting criminals weren’t the extent of literary nuances. There was a fountain out there, a crushing world of words and ideas, of dragons, queens, and even swashbuckling newsmen in Jacqueline Susann’s camera world. It was all there, and I could take it if only I stepped out.
Now, ten years later with me a little wiser, it makes me uncomfortable when asked, “What do you read?” Because I read everything. I read the instructions on the back of shampoo bottles (lather, rinse, repeat if necessary), I read the leaflets inside medicine boxes (consult your doctor), and I read titles as far ranging and different as The Book of Kings and The Goose Girl. I can tell you the parts of a medieval dueling sword while at the same time explaining how protons are made of quarks while gluons hold the nucleus of atoms together.
What have I learned through it all? Never ever hold yourself to a single thing. Read everything. Read adventure, mystery, politics, science. Read what makes your blood sings with the roar of speeding adrenaline and also what makes you want to put your head through a wall. Wise men and women have lived and died before us, leaving their life’s work so that we might be better than they were. We owe it to them. We owe it to us.
Read, because only YOU are responsible for your ignorance.
