FUN-damental Friday

When you were a kid what books sucked you in?

Archives New Zealand, used under a Creative Commons license

I don’t know about you, but for me reading has always been a refuge. It’s an escape and a hiding place and a safe space and a happy place. I would even say that I like the act of reading, the warm burrowing into words, more than the things one supposedly gets from reading.

In fact I really think that when I was growing up adults got the mistaken impression that I was intellectually gifted just because I read so much, and displayed some of the verbal skills one often develops from reading. This got me scholarships and some good grades, but I had a lot of drawbacks as a student that I never entirely shook, such as incredibly poor study habits, and I really think it was because I never liked learning from books so much as I liked reading them. If I didn’t relate to what the books were telling me — like physics, math, and even some humanities — it all turned into static.