My Journey as a Reader

 

 

Hello readers,

Welcome to my blog!

To start things up, I wanted to share my journey as a reader and how I decided to make reading daily my lifetime goal.

Like many others, I learned how to read in school, but I have always been especially interested in books. When I was a kid, I remember watching my mother spend many hours of her weekends reading books seemed to be such an exciting way to spend time. To make me join her during reading time, she would buy packs of comic books and take them home to read to me. 

I was always interested in the stories on every comic she'd read, and I always asked her to read the same stories repeatedly. I listened to the stories just so many times. While looking at the pictures in the comics, I memorized what happened on every page. Later on, I'd gather my cousins around and tell them that I had learned how to read; I'd flick through the pages and tell them the story I had memorized from beginning to end. In my head as a kid, it was so cool to read that I wanted to do it before I was able to.

I guess before reading; I already loved the concept of storytelling.

Now let's move forward with this story.

I grew even closer to books when I became a teenager. I loved listening to rock music, and all the musicians were constantly referencing their favorite books or writing songs based on books, which made me want to explore the universe of reading even further.

To this day, some of my favorite books are the ones that I read in those years. Books such as A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell.

The memory I cherish the most from my time in High School in Brazil, my native land, happened during a literature class. All students were assigned different books to make their presentations. It was the first time we were not doing a presentation as a group, and the first time we did not have to follow specific steps to present the book.

I was honestly excited about the story that I read, and I was the last one to show my presentation. Everyone was bored, it was just a regular day in class, and they had done just what they had to do to pretend they read their books and say something to make the teacher grade them enough to pass.

I was so excited about the book that I started retelling the whole story, I was making pauses, adding tension and intonation, and they were all so captivated. The time for our class had ended, and I did not feel like stopping, but I had to, so I stopped.

When I finished High School and faced the need to select a course to apply to a University, studying language and literature was a natural choice. Not only because I loved to read, but because at the time, I already had friends who were taking the course, and I thought they were cool. I guess the idea that they read a lot and studied things about books was a huge factor in attracting me to that lifestyle. Then, I applied and got accepted for a degree in Portuguese language and literature at UFSC (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina).

To be honest, taking a degree in literature was the shakiest part of my reading journey.

Here is where we faced turbulence.

During the first term, I was taking general literature and linguistics; I was excited and felt like I was expanding my reading universe to places it had never been before. Reading seemed like something tremendous.

That's when it started becoming overwhelming. The list of readings was infinite; they were never something that I could complete. That feeling of being unable to finish the long reading lists and the constant reminder from the literature teachers that we had not read enough was enough to set me off from reading.

I almost stopped reading for long months there until I finally found a passion and started writing my end-of-course thesis. During that process, I started reading about Madness, both in literature and philosophy, and that new approach to reading long lists, but lists in a topic of my selection brought me back to the game.

By the time I achieved my bachelor's degree, I was again in love with literature. 

I chose to leave my country after the presidential elections of 2018 and move to Canada. As an immigrant, when I arrived in Canada, I just found a simple job to pay the bills and get through. Being away from university and literary studies and feeling like that life was behind me put me off reading again.

The most traumatic part of this story was that when I decided to leave my country and my studies in literature behind, I believed that I would no longer need physical books with me.

I thought that my will to read would just vanish.

Then I sold every book I had.

It was not for a good amount of money, I was just about to leave the country, and I honestly needed the few bucks that I made selling my whole lifetime of books.

Then I arrived in Canada feeling empty. I was trying to believe that the minimalist choice of not having books cluttered in the house would make me feel better. I didn't. I caught myself several times craving a book to read, with no books around me, but in a way, I felt like reading had no use for me anymore. I did not know anyone else who liked reading. Mainly just for the pleasure of talking about the books they were reading. I honestly felt like readers would become a thing of the past.

That takes us to now.

I was late to the party, but I took more time than usual on YouTube during this pandemic. I found the BookTube community and Indie Writers talking about books and writing books in such a passionate way.

It made me believe that reading can be fun, that there are many people reading books out there that would enjoy talking about them, and maybe I just have not met them yet. It's not as easy to make friends when you're an adult working from home.

That's when I decided to make reading my daily goal. I just read every day, simple as that, as many pages as I can, and that's where we are on this journey.

I made this blog for sharing my readings, discussing them, and hopefully finding friends out there to talk about books.

I will be back soon to talk about my latest readings.

And now, let's go back to reading!