I HATED reading before. And only now, I have realised why

By RachelReads

I’m probably gonna ramble a bit here, but yeah—this is my whole deal with books and reading. When I was in school, I straight-up hated reading. Like, not “I don’t like this one book” hated it, but “I can’t make myself read anything from start to finish” hated it. It wasn’t even really peer pressure in the usual way (“books are for nerds, go play videogames instead”). I just wasn’t into it. Back then, everything we studied for literature was Russian writers. And I can admit they’re pretty awesome, but a lot of them felt like they were basically the same setup over and over. We had to read by periods, so once you’re assigned a certain time frame, the themes start to blend together. Also the style was super realistic—no fantasy stuff, just very grounded, sometimes brutal reality. Some books were short, some were long, some were fun in a comedic way, and others were depressing from beginning to end. So I felt like I was being forced to do it. Like, I had to read even if I didn’t enjoy it, and then analyze it with the group. And that kinda turned into this thought like, “Why would I bother with this one? It’ll probably be boring like the rest.” And when some of those books were REALLY long, it only made that worse. I know it sounds dumb, but that’s how it was for me. The weird thing is, I did actually like a couple of books from school. Mostly “Master and Margarita” and “The Little Prince” (not totally sure I translated the titles right, so I might be wrong). They just felt different from everything else we were assigned. Then I got really into visual novels, and I loved those. Like, all of them. Mostly because they were so over-the-top compared to what I was used to. If you’ve read them, you probably know what I mean. Now I’m 18 and I moved to a bigger city for my studies. My old place barely had anything like a bookstore, at least from what I remember, but here I’ve already bought a couple books myself—“The Divine Comedy” and “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Honestly, I never thought I’d end up reading a book because I wanted to, or buying one on my own. And I’m enjoying it. I feel like I’ve been missing out on this whole other world of books and writing, and I actually prefer reading the original over watching an adaptation, even when the adaptation is good. The only real problem right now is getting books in English. It’s not even my second language (it’s more like my third), but I still want to read in English more. I could read online, but it’s not the same—I need to physically have the book in my hands. I’ll probably deal with that later. So yeah, I guess I’m gonna start building my own collection from here. My goal is to read them all, eventually. Not sure why I posted this, but I guess getting thoughts out where other people can see them helps sometimes. Thanks if you got through all this. Cheers!