What Has Reading Done for Me

Reading started when I was a kid. Reading took me away from a boring existence in the middle of nowhere. There’s rural and then there’s where I grew up. Reading gave me friends when I didn’t have any in real life. It gave me ideas, made me laugh. Reading was my best and only friend when I was a kid. Reading was play.

When I was a teenager, I turned against reading. Reading didn’t get me anything I wanted then. I couldn’t get friends or girls or a life with reading.

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So I stopped reading. But I still didn’t get girls or a life.

Later, I forgave reading for not being what I needed back then. I picked up arty books. Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus. Dead French writers, yes. English writers, alive or dead, no. Their boring lumpen prose about factories and the working class. Talking on BBC Radio 4 about affairs in middle age. Who gives a shit? Not 18 year old me, that's for sure.

My soul soared. I was a fucking poet thanks to reading. Though I never actually read any poetry. Reading gave me the power to transcend the ordinary. To believe.

But reading did not tell me the actions necessary to transcend. Reading gave me fancy ideas and turned me into a terrible writer. I was a bad copy of Lester Bangs, Raymond Chandler, Baudelaire. A glitchy reproduction that wouldn’t fool anyone.

Reading ruined my life. I thought that to express ideas was enough. I read to escape reality. Reading told me many things but it never told me reality was inescapable.

Reading can be a terrible drug. Enter a book, leave the world behind. Books should come with government warnings.

Reading made me fall in love with words and a sentence that was written just so. I knew I loved reading. Reading made my vocabulary.

Reading made people call me weird. They could not relate. But I didn’t stop reading. Anyway, I wasn’t weird. They just never read anything. They would understand me if they only read a book once in their sad little lives.

Reading got me a job in a second hand bookshop after I dropped out of a university I didn’t understand why I was at in the first place.

I didn’t know much back then but I knew how to treat a book. The job was mostly conversation with unattractive men who read Terry Pratchett. I never got why anyone thought he was good. I do like that thing he wrote about whether you can buy cheap or expensive boots as an example of financial injustice though.

A cute girl used to come into the shop and we used to talk. I didn’t know any other girls. I don’t remember what she bought but I loved her summer dresses and I can still see her sun-bleached curly hair falling into her eyes. I asked her out on a date once. She didn’t say no exactly but the next time she came she brought her boyfriend and she didn’t introduce him, just made sure I saw them together. I never saw her after that.

Reading blew my mind. I have been to places I never would’ve been without reading. Not just geography. Reading gave me an inner landscape when I had no experience of anything. Reading got me where I am today.

I love reading. I never stop reading. I dislike video and social media. Bury me in text. Let my imagination do the work. I don’t care about actors or directors, give me a writer every time. Someone who can weave a whole world out of words. Something that’s more permanent and real than the house I live in.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading. I‘ve got a pile of books by my bed and I don’t stop buying more. I’m always looking for something to read.

Fiction, poetry, self-help, mathematics, philosophy. The choice is endless. Anything I want is in a book.

Reading is my speed. You show me a movie, I have to wait until the director is good and ready to move the story on. No thanks.

Give me reading or give me death.

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