My Love of Reading

Why I went from a novel addict to a rabbit hole diver

I was a huge reader when I was a kid. As the youngest in a nuclear family of 5, all of whom were weekly library visitors, I had a lot to live up to. And I did, I read countless novels starting out at a very young age and continued for a very long time — until I went to college.

When I was in grade 4, my love of reading took a little bit of a left turn. I wrote a story about how my motivations went from intrinsic to extrinsic that year, and how that was a direct result of reading.

Reading for the sake of reading

I still enjoyed reading fiction, everything that was fun and interesting and more often than not, on the fantasy side of things. Later in high school I began reading more non-fiction, as I thought that real life crazy stories were way cooler than made up ones — simply for the fact that they actually happened!

Reading for me was a way to cool down at night. A must-have before being able to fall asleep. Often the stories I was reading would carry over into the dream world and lead to very peaceful slumbers.

I always expected (not that I really thought about it) that this would be a life long habit.

Reading for the sake of reward

Then I got to college, more specifically a program in university where we had to consume massive amounts of information, then reorganize them into case studies, multiple choice exams, etc etc.

Never a big fan of attending classes (now that I was a free man in terms of mandatory attendance), I often chose to use my avid reading skills to learn a subject mostly on my own, via the huge textbooks for each class.

Reading started becoming a chore that I did every morning, not for enjoyment, but to finish my classes and learn.

The only times I read books for enjoyment during my four years in university were in my summers off from school, when I had to go back home to work.

After the four years of school, I didn’t read a single book for half a decade.

Reading transformed

I still read, mind you, but I became a consumer of news instead.

I suppose I finally joined the short-term mindset that my generation is famous for.

I could read a piece of news in a few minutes rather than hours. It became part of my daily work habits for me to ‘settle in’ at work. This kept up almost all the way until I quit my job in April this year.

Exploring the real world through Wikipedia

Reading geopolitics, Wikipedia articles, and anything else I could come across that was mildly interesting became my main source of reading consumption.

I don’t necessarily feel bad about this as I now consider myself quite up to date on a huge variety of topics, weird and normal, from around the world.

But it did make me long for those old habits of reading books every night.

Fiction, non-fiction, biographies, anything with great stories. I’d get lost in them at night and sleep like a baby without a care in the world.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get into that habit again either.

Best consumed during pooling

During my 6 months of travelling this past year, I did start reading more and I quite enjoyed it. Even cooler, I’d often read while sitting in a pool in the beautiful sunshine at hotels around Asia — definitely worse places to read!

But I couldn’t quite get into that nightly habit, its just too consumed by online media and Netflix these days. Perhaps that’s okay, and I just need to accept that we evolve our habits as we evolve ourselves.

I do have another trip to South East Asia coming up though, so maybe I’ll put down the Medium app for a while and plop down in a pool somewhere with a Forgotten Realms book.

Happy reading everybody!

‘Rant’ over.

Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful day and check out some of my other stuff here.