A year ago, I had a squirmy feeling. It was the bookworm I used to be, wanting to get out again. There weren’t really any books I’d heard of that I really wanted to read at that point, so time passed and next thing I knew I was all caught up in starting a job. In the latter months of last year, I began to have that need again and decided to start listening to audio books since my commute was extremely long. Now that I no longer have that crazy commute, I find the itch coming back again and I’ve decided to make use of the public libraries I haven’t been to in so long.
When I was a kid, all I did was read. I didn’t want to eat, sleep, or shower. I’d rather read. I’d read on my way to the bus stop, on the bus, walking down the halls between classes… anytime that I wasn’t talking to someone or listening to a teacher! I would read while eating (since I ultimately had to eat sometime) and I often turned showers into baths so that I could bring in a book to read. Yeah, I was pretty obsessive. In fact, I remember the first time I turned in a reading log to my 5th grade teacher. She called up my parents to confirm that they had indeed signed my form and really did believe I read that many books that week. I usually powered through about 25 to 30 age-appropriate books in a week. My mom even made me a special cloth bag so that I could carry all my books to the car in one go.
When I think about it, I can’t remember most of the things I read, but that habit as a child will come back to nudge me subconsciously every now and then. I do have faint recollections of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series, Goosebumps, the Boxcar Kids, Little House on the Prairie… and these things remind me of the childhood I had as a bookworm. I stopped reading so much right around the time I moved to New York in 7th grade. I guess the challenge of changing schools halfway through the school year and getting used to a more rigorous academic schedule took up all my time.
From then on, I started to get into physical activity, joining the track & field team, two swim teams, and JROTC. I no longer had the time to think of reading anything other than the schoolbooks I needed to for my classes. It also didn’t help that the books we had to read in high school were all rather dreary and too literary for me. I like a good story or lesson, not some convoluted message that takes multiple reads to understand. So into my young adulthood, I learned to read when I had to.
Then sometime in college I began to cultivate my interest in business, economics, psychology, and non-fiction in general. This was probably largely due to my desire to go into business and my choice to double major in Econ and Psych (surprise, surprise). And that’s what’s gotten me to where I am today – I love books like Freakonomics, The World is Flat (which I discovered because my dad got it for me as a birthday present one year!), and The Tipping Point. These are books with interesting studies, explanations of patterns and phenomena, and real lessons I can use. I’ve also begun to delve into books about evolution and atheism. While I considered myself agnostic for a long time, I’ve come to realize I’m really quite atheist and agnosticism now seems like a cop-out I used to not bring on conflict from religious people.
And there you go, the evolution of that little bookworm inside me that once loved cute stories and now seeks practical lessons.
