Saturday 14 April 2012

READ. NOW.



I love reading, I just don't do enough of it. I could blame it on the fact that my laptop and the mysterious, wonderful world of the internet distracts me but it mostly comes down to the fact that I can't be bothered. And that, in itself, is awful. It does depend on what book I'm reading at the time, whether it's so good I never want it to end or whether it's a book I picked out in a hurry and criticise it the whole time I'm reading, which ever one dictates on how long and when I'm prepared to read it. The most likely time is just before I go to sleep, which is also the most likely time I'll keep myself awake exploring the internet, Youtube is the worst culprit. It teases you with it's recommendations with enticing thumbnails and wacky titles that are just too good and intriguing to ignore. I can stay up for hours at a time on my laptop doing nothing significant or remotely educational/important as time whizzes by like someone turned up the speed of minutes. It's not good for me and I need to stop it.

Reading is one of the most fantastic things human beings do in the entire world. It can educate you on any subject single handedly, teach you new vocabulary without you even realising, feed the imagination with wonderful and exciting stories that are never to leave your memory. You can marvel at the works of people who've crafted words into their own masterpieces and tuned the techniques like that of a paintbrush, painting the page with magnificent images that every single person in the world can make their own. Different books can mean anything to anyone. The stories are what you make them to be, the characters are given to you for you to play around with sculpt them to who you wish. The information can be taken in in whatever way you want to interpret it, whatever YOU want to learn. That's what makes it so special, like art, it is never one specific thing it is a thousand things in single sentence. It is you written on paper.

So why I don't do it every waking minute of my existence, or why some decide they dislike it, is beyond me. To be fair, the printing press is slowly bidding farewell to the world and giving its revolutionary fame to the new and fast growing web which has more and more blogs, articles and stories uploaded every single day. Which I do read, every single day just not in the same way as books. Kindles are fast becoming widespread throughout the population as books are digitally downloaded onto the almost paper thin technology. Which, in my opinion, completely defies the point of a book. Books smell of the story they carry and are weighed down with the marvellous words they hold so the longer I can put off a Kindle the better, for me. What I need to do is balance the reading I do online with the reading I do offline so that every day I ingest a good amount of words. If the amount of reading I did online was a great amount then it wouldn't matter so much how little I did with books, but it isn't and both are irritatingly low.

I am fully aware of the fact this is completely and utterly down to me. It is not down to the fact that I was not brought up that way (which is certainly not the case with a Dad who practically eats books for breakfast, lunch and dinner) or the fact I don't have time or even that my school don't encourage me enough. I am the one complaining that I just simply don't read enough, therefore, I simply have to start reading... More. I just need to search harder for books that allow me to lose myself in stories I feel withdrawal from when they end. Fall in love with characters so much they become real to me. Cry when characters die as if they had been a life long friend. And most importantly just allow those stories and people and information to inspire me in ways I never imagined.

The world doesn't read enough. I've now decided. Everyone of every age needs to read a million times more, because then, I fully believe that we, as a race, will feel much better for all the words we take in.

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