On Reading

Reading has become my favourite hobby, but it was not always so. I enjoyed reading as a child, but I didn't read as much other bookworm children. My family had a Nintendo 64 and, later, a Nintendo Gamecube. I spent far more time video gaming than I did reading. Video gaming was my favourite hobby. My favourite books at the time were Brian Jacque's 'Redwall' series, and Robin Jarvis' 'Deptford Mice' trilogy.

When I went to high school I read less. Near the beginning of Year 7, I attempted to read both Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray, because I thought I was older now - I should try some harder books. I did not get past the first few pages. It was a big jump from Redwall to Wuthering Heights.

I could not seem to find time to read; I was quite unhappy in high school, and found the easy instant escapism of video games far more satisfying than books. In my first two years of high school, I think I only read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Angels & Demons (I was very interested in the Illuminati at this time), and The Lost World. I read some of the latter during the morning form time, and someone asked me 'what are you reading for?'

We got a computer at home, and I started to live more and more online. I played Star Wars Battlefront 2 a lot. Then I got addicted to World Of Warcraft. I was subscribed to the game for ONE YEAR (April 2006 - April 2007) and accumulated a play time of SIXTY DAYS. One sixth of that year was spent in a virtual life.

English lessons at school were a big factor in me stopping reading. All of the assigned reading was a big chore. The Year 7 set text was so dull I refused to read it, or do the homework assignment. I'd thought that reading was supposed to be enjoyable, and this book certainly wasn't. I lied to the teacher, saying that I had done it and handed it in. She did not believe me, and gave me a detention. I lied to my mum, saying I had done it and handed it in, and got her to write a letter to the school saying I had done it and thought the detention was unfair. The teacher apologised. I was a good pupil the vast majority of the time, so could get away with it.

The association of those lessons with reading, and the appeal of virtual worlds, did a good job of killing my enthusiasm for reading. I could understand why that girl in my class had incredulously asked me what I was reading for. What school had made us read was either outright boring, boring because we weren't ready to appreciate it, or was made boring by us being forced to over-analyse it to death. All for a GCSE. A friend from a different school told me that English was his favourite subject, and I could not understand how that was even possible.

A few months after leaving World of Warcraft, I was given Philip Reeve's 'Mortal Engines' Quartet by my mum; a colleague of hers had recommended it. I read the lot in one week, hooked. I started to think there might be something in the whole reading malarkey. Later that year, I decided to use the Waterstones vouchers I'd been given as Christmas and birthday presents over the years. They had nearly expired. I purchased 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy' by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, which is a mindfuck; 'Shadowmarch' by Tad Williams, which is an alright fantasy story; and 'Larklight' by Philip Reeve, which is a fun children's book. For Christmas, I received 'Anathem' and 'Cryptonomicon', both by Neal Stephenson. The former is so dull that it passes through 'boring' to reach something strange on the other side. The latter is so dull that when I was around a 100 pages (a hectopage, perhaps?) from the end of its 928 pages I realised I still didn't care what was happening, and gave up on it. My reading rate remained slow.

At the beginning of A2 year (Year 13), I cleared a lot of nerdy paraphernalia from my shelves. Looking at my shelves, I decided to fill the empty space between the remaining action figures with books that I had read, sure that there had to be something to the reading malarkey.

I quickly discovered that reading could be lots of fun, if you were reading what you wanted to read,  and did not read anything that, for whatever reason, you did not enjoy. I got out of the prideful have-to-finish-a-book-because-I've-started-it line of thinking. I was reading for pleasure; any book that did not give me pleasure was wasting my time; I had already wasted my money on purchasing it, I would not waste my time as well. The book that broke me from the prideful line of thought to the wild hedonistic reasoning was 'The Secret History of the World' by Jonathan Black, which is shit.

That year my reading rate was at its highest. I had bookmarks in four different books at a time: a long novel, a shorter novel, a short story collection, and a non-fiction. At bedtime, I would read a chapter of each before going to sleep. I finished a book every 2-4 days. I read at college, at home, on the bus, on car journeys, on train journeys. I spent a lot of time reading. I felt like I had missed out on so many years of reading, and now needed to catch up.

I had an operation in December 2010 which left me housebound for a month while I recovered. My activity alternated between revising for my upcoming exams, seeing the friends that visited, playing on the Nintendo Wii I had received for Christmas (this was mostly done with the friends who visited) and reading. On the days when no one visited, I would revise one topic, then read one chapter of a book, and repeat this pattern for the day.

After I'd caught up on the quantity of books read, I wanted to have read all the mind-blowing science fiction novels while I was still young and impressionable. Science fiction is my favourite genre. I read a lot of SF classics, mostly those from Gollancz's SF Masterworks series. There is now a lot of Gollancz yellow on my shelves. This phase of my reading career concluded with Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, which is THE mind-blowing science fiction novel. I had worked up to it, wanting to be ready for it, and it did not disappoint.

After Star Maker I found SF unsatisfying, so started to read more 'literary' classics. A year before Star Maker, I had read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which gripped me so strongly that I read most of it in one night. It showed me that the classics, which were, to me, still associated with those awful English lessons, could actually be enjoyed. After Star Maker, I read Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, which was exhaustingly difficult: after about ten minutes I felt like I needed to lie down and rest. But I enjoyed it. Now I'm working through the famous classics, to see what all the fuss is about. After all, they've been around so long and people are still going on about them, so there's gotta be something to them, right?

The shelves in my room were quickly filled, and there are now two more bookcases in my room, which are nearly full. And that is after accounting for the fact that a lot of the books I read back in college are no longer there. Before I got the extra bookcases, I occasionally did a book clearout when I was running out of space. For aesthetic reasons, I'm trying not to double stack, or be forced to rest any horizontally on top.

Mount Toread, my to-read pile, is huge.