Reading the world
Books are magic. They come to us at the most amazing times, they last longer than movies and if they arrive in paper form, they stay close to us forever.
I was just a little kid in second grade when I realized that books opened up the world to me. Not so much a magic world to escape to, like the Shire in LOTR or onto the Quidditch pitch in HP. But rather a world where I could read another person’s thoughts, because I hadn’t quite mastered the skill of roping out people’s feelings or trying to milk them for details at 3 am when the whole world seems like it enters another dimension for a couple of hours. Though we had an amazing music teacher who would either make up songs with “deep” messages conveyed by platitudes, or she found them somewhere in a book of barely tolerable children’s music, we would sing this one that was about walking in a mile in someone’s shoes. I don’t really think that worked as well as books. The thing is that the teachers and I guess by proxy the whole world instilled in us that we are special and unique, and we kept on focusing on what made us so irreplaceable and more worthy than gold.
But when you pick up a book and you read how someone is afraid of swimming (Judy Blume), or someone is anxious to get their first period (Judy Blume), you realize early on the emotional complexity of other people. I guess that it didn’t dawn on me immediately, otherwise I would have been able to forgive my parents a long time ago, but still it gave me a different perspective on what might be going on with other people. I guess it wasn’t so much as being a mind reader, but having compassion. Not so much focused on the details and one specific moment in time, but a kind of flowing feeling of understanding someone else.
Of course, books also act as wanderlust therapy. I don’t know why people have this persistent need to escape. Maybe it’s also another lame cliche.
It used to be easy to use the subject of books as an icebreaker. I remember the couple of times I tried during uni.
The first time was when I was a tutor for the freshmen, and we had gone out to have drinks in one of the most horrible bars in my city (pool kuus; or half 6) and we were sitting in the grimy cellar, and one of the freshmen said, oh, I haven’t read a full book since the 10th grade.
And the second time was when I talked to another classmate from my Master’s, who said that he doesn’t read so much fiction, because he would prefer to learn something when he reads.
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that this has stuck with me for so long that I still think about it when I’m trying to choose the next book to read. Sometimes I get such an averse reaction from reading a book that it carries into making my next choice, and I don’t want to be a quitter who puts down a book that sucks, nor do I want to waste my time again. Still, I think I may have learned something there?
Here I am, binge reading in order to finish 35 books by the end of this year, wondering if I should go to Senegal to brush up on my French and where I would put my books if I did.
