Were you a kid that always had their nose in a book? Have things changed as you've gotten older? It's only natural, but if you're like me, you miss how much time you used to be able to dedicate to reading.
A childhood filled with books is one of the best childhoods out there. Your young self’s imagination goes wild with all of the different story plots you read. Whether it was a coming of age story for a child, a wild adventure, or one filled with wizardry and magic, our imaginations were left to dream up things to our wildest imagination. We all started off somewhere, whether it was a Magic Tree House story, or a Junie B. Jones novel, and it only increased our love for reading even more. Eventually, as we grew older, we got out of the 20 page large font chapter books, to what I considered “the real deal” at the young age of 7, which was nothing more than a book with smaller font and a few more pages. But once we established out love for reading there was no stopping us. Fiction, non-fiction, chapter books, picture books, we loved them all.
Our favorite day in elementary school was when the book fair came to school and we begged our parents for more and more books or even one of the little trinkets they sold. That day was like Christmas all over again and afterwards we would lock ourselves up for the next few nights reading our next favorite book. But slowly as we grew older and had already tackled some of the literature greats such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, we transitioned from reading as a hobby to reading as a chore.
We started to collect a stack of books on our nightstand of hopeful reads that we one day hope to start. Or even better, a bunch of books that we have started, but are nowhere near close to finishing, and probably won’t have time to finish in the near future. We get assigned books to read in class, but they are almost never something you would pick off the shelves yourself, so we try and read them, but we mentally label it as homework instead of pleasure.
Eventually we start slacking, maybe even looking up summaries to get us through the work load. At this point we have lost track of the child who used to love reading and would read at every chance we could get. As we got older and curriculum starts to change, we take all the fun out of reading with our own heads instead of enjoying it as another opportunity to read and learn. Summer rolls around and we tell ourselves we are going to read X amount of books this summer since we claim we didn’t have time during the school year.
But repeatedly, we find ourselves at the end of summer with yet another list of books that we haven’t even touched. We found it more necessary to read tweet after tweet and every other Facebook status and Instagram caption in-between, instead of a book that may bring us great pleasure. Great literature has become a lost art in our eyes, and even though we had grown up loving to read and never thinking we would change, here we are.
