Hello everyone,
I wanted to talk about what brought us all to reading. I actually was not a huge reader growing up. I struggled a lot with literacy in my childhood. As an adult, I took a job with a long commute and then started to read a book if I got to work early. This started my book reading hobby. I have read over 300 books in the last two years. Now that I read everyday I feel like it is my favorite hobby. I go to the library each week and I check out tons of books.
by Prestigious-Quiet907
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I was bullied a lot at school and turned to books and lost myself in the worlds that authors would create. Used them as an escape from real life. This hobby continued through adulthood
The escapism. That’s why I love the imagination of fantasy so much.
I wasn’t a huge reader either! I read Harry Potter, some obscure fantasy books, but that’s about it. It was only when I was doing my A-Levels did I really feel that pull to reading. I fell in love with Hamlet from my VERY eccentric tutor who was truly obsessed with Shakespeare. Then I decided to study Literature at Undergrad.
I remember vividly walking into a second hand bookstore and finding a copy of The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. I had watched the 90s Interview with the Vampire but didn’t know it was related. I was drawn to this book for some reason and started reading it in the winter. When I tell you my mind was blown at how immersive and beautiful the prose was. Then I read Frankenstein and boom: I was hooked and have been since!
My dad was and still is a huge reader. I think everyone just has to find that book or series that allows them to truly escape and fully immerse for the first time. Mine was Gulliver’s Travels.
Honestly, I think Book-it. But I also likely would have read as much without it because I wouldn’t have done book-it if I didn’t already like reading. Incentives like that don’t work typically for me unless I have an interest established.
I was natural, I guess. My whole family was full of readers. My mum, My uncles, My grandparents. I was always surrounded by books
Reading Little Women as a kid and getting extremely mad that >!Beth dies!<, so I read something else to get my mind off of it.
I definitely read a lot as a teenager, but those were mostly easier-to-read story-driven stuff without particularly heavy prose. I got more into the densely literary stuff when I was 17 having spent an afternoon reading Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen while on LSD, which kind of opened my mind to the power of words. that’s when I started diving much deeper.
My parents read to me from a young age and encouraged me to read. They gave me my love for books and reading. I will be eternally grateful to them for that.
i read a lot as a kid, cause i didn’t really like people a lot.
basically up until i had kids.
but readings great cause you get to make your own movie in your head, and i never cast ryan reynolds for anything.
My grandmother. Every time she came to visit she brought me a stack of western novels. Real “grown-up books”, I thought at the time. She made me feel like an equal, that we could share these stories.
When I was abt 9, I got sick and had this contagious shit and i couldn’t go to school or outside for 5 weeks. I got extremely bored, my mum checked me into the library and picked up my books. I read about 10 books a week lolll and from then i just continued and got addicted to hp
You mean, a book for children, or later on a book not specifically targeted to children?
If it’s the first, for me that was a series of books for young readers about a family where the children investigated mysteries. It’s called The Happy Hollisters. A bit later on, Enid Blyton’s books.
As for books not specifically for children, for me that was The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, and Foundation, by Asimov.
So, this might sound obnoxious. At the age of about two my parents noticed I was trying to read things. A lovely tutor was called in and she taught me to read and do some simple maths and she also bought me some of my first books! She was wonderful. I ended up starting school late (I was 4), but because I could already read, write, and do starter maths then just decided to stick me straight into kindergarten and then after that I went off to grade 1. And the rest is history, I never put down my books again, just grew into more energy, more dragons, more magic, and so on and so forth. I adventured across many a universe in my childhood, and they’re really great memories for me 🙂