Books are your way out!

When I was younger, my parents didn’t push me to play a sport. They didn’t sign me up for GK classes, singing (they tried this – disastrous consequences) or any of the 1,000 other activities that would probably have helped me in the future. They didn’t do any of this — but they did manage to inculcate in me the most important trait — an immense love for reading. 

My parents, themselves, are poles apart when it comes to reading. While my mum will never pass up the opportunity to just curl up with a book and coffee, my dad can often be seen sitting rigidly on the living room couch, reading a popular fiction like an assignment, trying to analyse whether it’s worth the hype or not. Well, I’m happy to say that I resemble my mum when it comes to reading. 

Ever since a young age, my parents and grandparents fostered the love of reading in me. They didn’t make me read — they made sure that I wanted to. I still remember the day I read my first book in school — The Gingerbread Man — with a lot of help from my kindergarten teacher. By the end of the day, we had gone over the pages so many times that when I came back home, I could recite the entire book verbatim. Seeing me so happy with a book, my dad immediately went out and bought two more books and from that day, every evening I would sit with him and we would read them together. Soon enough, I stopped stumbling over sentences, the point of reading changed from trying to comprehend the story to actually appreciating the story and finally, I didn’t have to read aloud anymore — I had acquired the ability to enjoy the books in the quiet company of my own mind. 

The fact that I associate reading with pleasure has always been a huge asset for me. I welcome assignments that require me to read huge articles because I like reading so it doesn’t seem like work. Years of reading has also refined my writing. It has taught me how to alter sentence structures to change the emotion being conveyed, it has taught me to build characters that people can love as well as hate, and it has taught me the connotative meanings behind a plethora of words, actions, syntaxes and more. 

Books inspire me. Not in the ‘oh-I-want-to-be-a-hero’ way, but in a subtler, empowering way that comforts you with companionship and lack of judgement. There are times when I read a particularly great sentence and stop, thinking, “I wish I had written that.” 

In a world where life is an inevitable race, books are your way out. Want to stop time? Read. Want to change reality? Read. Want to relax? Read. 

My English teacher once told me something that will always stay with me. She said, “If you don’t like reading, it just means you haven’t found the right book.” I couldn’t agree more.