Reading: Problem/Escape

I am bad at being an adult for a number of reasons that I won’t go into, but one of the main issues that has come up has been that I spend a lot of money on books. The moniker of “Broke Book Reader” is not entirely true but dammit it’s close. Weirdly I never feel guilty about this even though I have an app on my phone that lets me know where money is going and breaks it down and offers advice for how to better manage my money. One of the tidbits I always get is to cut back on spending at: Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and Half Priced Books. I see them and immediately disregard them. Why? Well, I told you I’m bad at being an adult, but I also prescribe to the idea that I love to read and I therefore don’t mind spending money on what I love to do. This led me then to the question that had been asked by a lot of people that know me. “How did you get into reading?” Or “You don’t look like the reading type.” Hurtful. Also, understandable in a sense. See when I was younger I hated reading I used to sneak out of class in elementary school and run to the bathroom so I didn’t have to read and shocker teachers didn’t like that, so I endured. Then in the fifth grade me and my brother got into a fist fight with a kid named Christopher, while I didn’t start the fight or really have any desire to partake I was the only one to be seen throwing a punch. So, I was given “in school suspension” for a week. As the class work came in I was forced to finish it all, a weeks worth of assignments but you don’t really understand how long a school day is until you have to sit in one classroom for 7 hours with nothing to do other than the work in front of you, no talking, no escape. Soon I found that all the assignments were finished by the second day and they didn’t really have anything else to give me. Then in a turn of tragic events the librarian took over the “ISS” room and saw me with an empty desk,she promptly sent me to the library with the instruction of finding a book with over 200 pages. She might as said go to the dentist and opt out of anesthesia. That how much I hated to read. Waking down the hall in my blue collared shirt and starchy Ill-fitting khaki pants I wanted to just run into the bathroom and hid all day. Sadly she gave me a hour to peruse the library and find something to read. I remember going up to the front desk and handing the women behind the counter my pass and she stamped and said “ I’ll let you know when your time is up” I looked for sports books at first because I played football and thought it would be easier to digest a sports book than Treasure Island or something but none of the books fit the page requirements. I was frustrated and literally on the verge of tears because of the prospect of having to read all day everyday until Friday. I looked and looked until I found a book that had a wolf on it by the name of White Fang by Jack London. I read the synopsis and I liked that is was essentially about a wild animal and it was 252 pages. So walked up and checked it out and went back to the room. I showed the librarian the book I got and I remember she smiled and said “You’re in for an adventure” I rolled my eyes and sat down. It took me about an hour to finally nut up and begin to read. I didn’t like it, it had these words that I didn’t know and I thought it was boring and I told the librarian that I wanted to read something else something better. She said no. She gave me a dictionary so I could look up the words that I didn’t know and thus began the week that for lack of a better phrase changed my life. I read and read struggling at first then finally breaking through and finishing the book about a week later. I turned it in and wanted to check out another but there is that stereotype that if you read you’re a nerd and at the age and in the fifth grade that was a death sentence so i never really read in front my friends. I asked my mom to get me a library card and she was happy because she has always tried to get me to read more and I was finally taking to it. Now my path to reading really exploded when I got to high school I gained a lot of confidence from sports and started to care less about what people thought and this was when I found Stephen King. I read Carrie and Salems Lot and was floored by both and I wrote reports about them I wrote essays about them, i told everyone about them. A lot of my friends didn’t give a shit about reading but I kept doing it. That’s the point I’m trying to make and the answer I give to people when they ask me how I got into reading and why love it, because I kept doing it even though people around didn’t think it was cool and some made fun of me I didn’t stop because I loved it. To think back to that room that so quiet that it was deafening and see myself and remembering that feeling of being trapped, and being able to escape through a book and block out everything else was amazing. I always think of books as windows that you can climb out of and be in a totally different and new world and that was what I needed when I was kid sitting in that classroom.