Member-only story
The Journey of a Reluctant Reader Turned Bookworm
I went from being the slowest reader to reading 100 books a year.
I wasn’t the most bookish child. My mother read to me when I was younger until I reached the age when it became normal to read books independently, so I had some exposure to the typical childhood books. However, I was an avid gamer and a voracious manga reader. Though I burned through literally hundreds of volumes of manga, reading every last series my library had (which led to me reading some incredibly inappropriate books, but that’s a story for another day).
But novels? Not as much as you might expect from a future literature and creative writing major staring down PhD programs.
In my early teenage years, novels were a slog.
I was not a fast reader. Getting through a single page felt like a boss fight. And an entire chapter? In one sitting? Impossible.
I can’t even blame the internet or social media for my attention issues because I grew up in a small town that didn’t get high speed internet until 2010. I was such a slow reader that even if a story was really interesting, the act of reading was so exhausting that I couldn’t enjoy it.
