From Scrolls to Stories
How I Fell in Love with Reading After Failing to Read
Disclaimer : It may sound like advice and I may look like a madman. But you always have a choice. If you choose to read it to the end, thanks.
Have You Ever Felt It?
Have you ever read a paragraph again and again, and at every iteration, you felt your imagination growing wild and kept pondering its meaning, and got goosebumps each time?
Yes, I mean literally—you can feel that adrenaline rush by reading too. If not, try reading a book that talks about a topic that you find interesting.
How It All Started
Before you ask, yes, I have experienced it and it’s my starting point into my hobby of reading. Before I speak about it, please bear with me for a few minutes, as I am going to talk about this experience—as for a lot of people, it may be a stopping point.
If you had to ask me, that experience gave me fear and a hell lot of doubts. The use of appropriate yet complicated words increased my dependency on the dictionary to understand their meaning, and every time I discovered the meaning, my imagination also went wild. At the same time, I got distracted a lot. After much struggle, my reading speed was negative. While starting to read, I needed to go backwards a few paragraphs and connect the dots with the new one, and I felt it opened a new perspective. I felt my confidence to continue reading was diminishing.
The First Book
This was my first book, and I was a noob in the art of reading. Even though I stopped reading it after only a few pages, that book showed me a new world, a new hobby. It encouraged me to start reading again. It was like a final boss of a game that showed up at level 1.
A New Path
So thanks to the book, I started to read again. But this time, I went down a different path. I started reading comics first, and after a few short ones, I started reading web novels. These novels are like a web series. I found topics like time travel, superhumans, and aliens to be more interesting.
Limitless Imagination
I found a new world. I could feel my mind was more active and imagining without bounds. Then I started reading books in my mother tongue. Yes, I got addicted to that feeling of limitless imagination, and I started binge reading.
One thing I felt while reading was that I had no boundaries of imagination and creativity, which I often feel in visual media. In visual media, I feel that our imagination is controlled by what we see. When I see a castle in a comic or movie, we will subconsciously limit our imagination within the constraints that are shown to us. But while reading about the same castle in a book, that limit is not present. You can create your own castle and its boundary. The limit is what you set or are capable of. And when you read more, that limit grows.
The Brain Knows
You can ask—how can you imagine a thing that you haven’t even seen or known?
Believe in yourself. Your brain is much more interesting than you think.
Before the Book
As a person born in the late 90s, I had the privilege to enter into social media at its early stages. I was also a person who had an account on almost all the social media platforms, including Orkut. Before I met this book, I was an active person on social media, and I felt what most of you feel right now—"not enough," or "oh, it’s already evening!!!" or "shit, the weekend just went like that."
One Book Away
If you made it this far, then just give reading a try. Go to a bookstore, pick up a book, and similar to me, you will find a book that makes you buy it. Yes, it’s like a wand—I believe there is a book for everyone to be chosen.
Happy reading.
If you’re curious:
Yes, I haven’t completed my first book. And after this, I am planning to start reading along with my writings.
Name of the book? I’ll tell you in my next letter.