Reading

When I was a kid, I used to sit at Chapters and read for hours on end. If I picked up a book that I like, I absolutely had to finish it before I went home. Thank you, grandma, for bearing with me while I consumed volume after volume of Warriors, Redwall, and whatever else ended up in my grubby 8 year old hands. Now that I’m 23 years old, I’m not entirely sure if I could still pull that off. Nowadays, it’s not really a matter of can but of want. In the past, I was reading through a book a week; I probably average between zero to one books a season now.

Almost everything I’ve read has been fiction. While there have been times where something historical interests me (like WWII Wikipedia diving back in high school), I prefer reading stories that ultimately aren’t real. While the world we live in is a vast place, I’ll always get to experience the things it has to offer. Why not escape for a moment to a world different than our own? To me, thinking about the theoretical what-ifs that arise from a fictional world is really fun. It’s about seeing the different parts of the world being introduced and wondering how each mechanism could be used in the story. You might be able to guess that my favourite genre is sci-fi and fantasy. I might get some flak for saying this, but they’re honestly very similar – with the exception that one explains phenomena with technology while other with magic, and one has elves while the other has aliens.

During the quarantine, I’d like to dive into reading again. Not that there’s much else more to do, right? I’m looking at Slaughterhouse Five as the next book on my reading list. It’s just a matter of finding it somehow. I’d also like to re-read some books I’ve enjoyed before. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and Nightfall by Isaac Asimov come to mind (I highly recommend both).