Read people! Read! And I’m not talking about the internet, or a magazine or a link you found on Facebook, I’m not talking about reading a blog (as ironic as that is that I’m saying that here) not even the newspaper.

Read books. On paper, not on screens!

I grew up as a passionate reader of English. I would finish up books in a few days, some of which I had even stolen from my school’s library.

It was a way of traveling, of exploring of being someone or somewhere else. Some of my favorites where Harry the poisonous centipede or anything Roal Dahl.

I even recall one time at a beach holiday where my friend who was a guest, got mad at me because all I did was loose myself inside ‘Matilde’.

Like most teenagers of our times, I stopped being so interested in books and was concerned by my ‘social life’ and then came, Facebook! I must confess I am an addict and with the use of this new trend of living online, I lost my ability to read.

This is indeed a fact which must be remarked, reading is a skill. Stop reading, loose your skill.

I would try to read at various occasions but I couldn’t help skimming through lines, paragraphs… pages, and feeling the necessity of ‘instant’ information.

There is no question that this is the consequence of the Internet as a source information and the enormous amount of time we spend on social media has made us dependent on the speed and simplicity of what we are reading.

Recently I began to feel overwhelmed, saturated and quite frankly bored by the Internet. I wasn’t seeing, learning or reading anything interest and then I remembered how much I use to love books.

One of the best things to do to rehabilitate the skill of reading, is to re-read some of your favorite books. And so I did:

‘The Crazy Man’ by Pamela Porter

‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time’ by Mark Haddon (I can’t recommend it enough!)

‘The Little Prince’ and now it’s Josteip Gaarder’s ‘Sophie’s World’.

I immediately felt the connection again and was easily absorbed by the amazing stories. It felt so good to read and picture everything in my mind, like nothing had changed since I was a little girl.

Another reason to read? Writing. Reading is a skill and writing too is a skill which develops with reading.

I started to realize how my vocabulary had become so poor and my grammar embarrassing (you should see all the red underlining on this word document) and it’s due to the vocabulary you find online and I also blame the auto-correct on my I-Phone.

That’s pretty much all I have to say, I will now wonder off to the pages of Sophie’s world. 78 done, 445 to go. . .