Why I Read
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
- George R R Martin
There are days when I am confused, sad and questioning everything that comes my way and there are days when I am jubilant, energetic and answering everything that comes my way. There are times when I am looking at people wanting them to stop speaking so I can go to my comforting solitude and there are times when I am in the mood of merriment, talking and laughing with people. Yet, on all these days and in all these times, I read, every day of every week of every month.
The moment I pick up a book, I feel virtually transformed to a different world. When I get into reading it, I feel as if a part of me is inside the place or the person or the theory that the author is describing. When I close the book for the day, I retrospect into what could have been different in the book. Sometimes, I am awestruck by the finesse with which the author has chosen a particular set of words, and delve into some quotes or ideas or a character for a long time. To cite an example, one from the book I am reading now and another from the one I was reading before, would give a better understanding of my happiness. In the book, Algorithms To Live By, the authors have stated the concept of logarithmic increasing regrets. They have elaborated how regrets should be increasing at a lesser rate with time in your life if you are improving your decisions with time. What a wonderful concept, I’d say. Then when I was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Hagrid says in it, “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” Such a simple yet beautiful adage by someone as cute and simple as Hagrid only made me smile and be mesmerised by J K Rowling’s writing finesse at the same time. It is nothing short of a magic that some combinations of 26 letters of the alphabet make you want to keep re-reading them, wanting some books to never end, at the same time wanting to know whole of the book quickly. This I’d say is a reader’s greatest dilemma.
Often, I talk to people who say, they do not have time for reading. I differ. You do not have time for reading, because you do not want to read. It is as simple as that. All of you are willing to spend minutes and hours on social media or OTT platforms. I ask you, 10 minutes of reading everyday could make your life much better, what would 10 minutes of social media or OTT platforms give? For the people who say they have a stressful lifestyle and a gruelling schedule, I’d say reading for even 10 minutes a day could make their work and lifestyles more efficient, isn’t that a lot more helpful than most other leisure timepasses?
My point is, my life could have kept going even if I hadn’t devoted some part of it to reading, but that life is not the life I would have enjoyed. Reading has given me my whole another world of my own where I learn so many things without changing my physical dimensions, where I can be myself and not worry about a lot of things for some time, where my books wait for me in the same manner every day without expecting anything in return. I ask you, what better companions would you get in this world than the books?
Please email me your reviews at sdshivanidubey@gmail.com.
