A Love Letter to Reading
Has your relationship with reading fluctuated over time? Mine, too.
If I think back throughout my life, throughout my childhood, my teenage years, and now my university years, one thing has always been constant. The beige pages of a book have always been there, sometimes as a world to escape to, sometimes as something I miss, and sometimes as something that felt a million miles away nevertheless, though there was always a story ready for me to escape into.
As a child, my local library was where I spent the majority of my time. Every Saturday and every other Tuesday, almost without fail. I would spend hours and hours looking through the shelves and would end up walking out of the sliding doors with my dedicated library bag bursting at the seams. I partook in 'booktrack', a reading scheme for children aged six and over where you were challenged to read 100 books. Each week you got to discuss the books you had read with a librarian, and I remember the joy I got from relaying the story I had spent the week engrossed in back to them.
Once I had completed 'booktrack', I moved on to join the library's book club. Every other Tuesday, my sister, my best friend, and her sister would squash into my mum's car after school, eat a KitKat, down a fruit shoot, and head to the library. We sat in the middle of the children's section, around a circular table, and discussed whichever book we had read over the last couple of weeks. We would always laugh much too loudly for a library and have a beautiful, often hilarious conversation about the literature that we had devoured.
During this point, reading was the most magical thing in the world to me. I could disappear into a book for hours. My life revolved around consuming everything that Jaqueline Wilson wrote, and our childhood games involved us imagining that we lived at Malory Towers. Daryll Rivers may as well have joined our friendship group.
I think something that often happens to people who were avid readers as a child is that as a teenager, they stop reading. I know this was certainly the case for me. When I set up my social media accounts at thirteen, the balance between screen time and reading time abruptly switched. I was no longer devouring multiple books a week; instead, I was devouring hours and hours worth of social media content and maybe getting through one book a month at a push. Once I started studying for my GCSEs and A-levels, I stopped reading entirely, and it became something that I classed as 'something I only had time for on holiday unless, of course, it was for school'. I grew frustrated when I couldn't lose myself inside a story in the same way I once had.
I feel like I'm constantly trying to find books that will take me back to how engrossed I used to get. I take inspiration from Tik Tok recommendations and book tube videos, so the thing that made my relationship with reading change is now helping the relationship heal.
Last month, for the first time in a long time, a book consumed my life. I'd seen everyone talking about 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and I downloaded it onto my kindle (also something I always forget I have but find really motivating!). The following day I drove my sister to her singing lesson in a nearby beach town and sat and waited for her on a bench by the water, tapping through the pages. Evelyn Hugo's world entranced me, it reminded me of the love I've always had for reading, and for the first time in a long time, I couldn't put the book down.
The most important thing to help me get back into reading is reminding myself that I should read in the way I did before when I was a child. Then, there was no need to track every page on a website or keep up with how much other people were reading. Reading to me is defined as something peaceful, calming and beautiful. It is not a competition, and it's something I should use to take the pressure away.
So here's to reading and the increasingly complex relationship many of us have with. Let's take it back to basics and escape into books the way we did when we were children.
