How I Went from Hating Reading to being Obsessed with Books!

When I find myself being socially awkward, I usually try to turn the conversation to books or find other book lovers I could talk to. My intention is not to be a book snob at all, it is merely a rather clumsy attempt at avoiding social awkwardness. But I wasn't always this way. As a kid I HATED reading. When I was 8 or 9 my mother offered to pay me if I would read books. Her bribes did not work on me! My mother told me that as a kid I only liked picture story books because I hated reading. She said that I would make up my own stories based on the pictures there instead of reading the story. The reason was, I was dyslexic. Growing up in India, back in the 80s, there was no diagnosis. Kids just laughed at you at school because you couldn't read well.

My Curiosity Got the Better of me (and my dyslexia)

I was always a curious kid, had way too many questions about everything. I wanted to understand everything. I would ask lots of questions. In my early teens I reached a stage where the adults in my life couldn't quite answer the questions I had. Or the kinds of answers they gave did not make sense to me. It was time to fly on my own. Around this time I realized that if I just read books, that would be where I could find answers. My curiosity got the better of me. I forced myself to read a very small book, more of a booklet really, explaining Einstein's theory of relativity using the traveling train example, and that changed the way I looked at the world. I was amazed how such a small book could change the way I looked at life. This discovery that books can change my life changed my relationship to reading.

That was the first stage of my reading evolution. It started me on the journey of reading. My mother was happy that I was reading. I read everything I could get my hands on at the tiny library my school had. I was reading mostly fiction at that point I think - Jane Austen, Jeffery Archer and other British writers. Slowly I overcame my dyslexia - or perhaps my consistent effort at reading rewired my brain to help me read, even if slowly.

My Love for Philosophy

While I was doing my engineering school, I chanced upon Any Rand. This was the second seismic shift in my reading journey. I had discovered the power of ideas! I became interested in philosophy - why do people do what they do? Why is society organized the way it is? What do we do to change things for the better?

This evolution in my reading meant that I focused more on non-fiction books. I decided I will not read fiction any more. Fiction is about emotions, which I did care about, or so I told myself. I wanted to understand everything about everything. That was my goal. This continued into my early 20s and mid 20s. I was indeed a book snob back then. I looked down on people who read fiction. I couldn't imagine why someone would want to waste their time reading Harry Potter. In fact I tried reading the first book, and when I read about a big guy jumping from a flying motorcycle, I stopped. Sorry Hagrid!

On Tolkien and Fairy Stories

This journey of just reading non-fiction lasted a decade. This was through 2000s where lots of my friend were huge Harry Potter fans. I couldn't understand why someone would want to waste their time reading fantasy books. But this was until I read an essay by Tolkien called On Farie Stories. This essay is Tolkien's personal philosophy of fantasy literature. What Virgil was for Dante in Divine Comedy, Tolkien was for my in my reading journey. He opened up a new intellectual avenue for me to my heart, I travelled this highway back to literature.

It was only when i quit my software job to go to seminary (long story for another time!), that during my winter break I decided I would give Harry Potter another go after all. Then I of course kicked myself for being too much of a stupid snob and missing out on Harry Potter in my late teens, early twenties. And so in my 30s, I tore through Tolkien, Dostoevsky, and a few others. I noticed that because I had spent my 20s reading philosophy my reading of literature was much enriched. When I would go to literature discussion groups and share my insights on the assigned readings, people were surprised how I got those deep insights from seemingly mundane material. I was happy that all that philosophy reading in my 20s wasn't wasted, except it made me horrible at dating, which is another story for another time!

A Sense of Mortality

Into my late 30s, my reading has shifted back into the non-fiction mode, except a very different way of reading non-fiction books. Back in my early 20s, I would read books from cover to cover. But now I have way too many books, about twelve hundred physical books and thirteen hundred kindle books. Even if I lived to be a 100, which is not likely given my gene pool inheritance, I wouldn't ever have read all the books. Getting close to 40 has given me a sense of mortality, a sense of running out of time. So I have been skim-reading through multiple books in parallel. I have skim-read over a 100 books this year: 121 to be exact because I have as many evernotes on the 2022 books folder.

But the problem with this parallel-skim-reading approach is that, if someone asks me, "What are you reading?" I freeze. I find it hard to talk about any of the many books I have been reading. My attempt at trying to recall all the books I am skimming through usually gets my brain stuck in a space of analysis paralysis, making me feel rather awkward. Irony being that this social awkwardness is what I was trying to avoid in the first place by turning the conversation to books!