FEATURE STORY

Rekindling my love for reading

Iwas a bookworm as a kid, all through elementary school. I was always reading at two to four grade levels ahead of my own, spending more time in the library than with friends. I looked for the biggest books on the shelf to borrow because I would be back within days if I didn’t. When I was eleven, I read the “Harry Potter” series in a month. Once, at a parent-teacher conference, everyone expressed concern about how I didn’t have many friends and used the library pass more often than going to recess. When the teacher decided to limit my use of the library pass, I just took the books outside with me instead.

All this is to say, I loved books—and I lost that passion.

When certain books became required in school, and generally boring literature filled my book list, I lost my love for reading. But I didn’t realize this loss until college when professors urged us to read on our own and learn how to write better stories. We could read anything: fiction, biography, comics, news, short stories.

I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t settle my brain on the idea. And when I did try to read something small, I would get stuck re-reading words and phrases. Maybe it was my obsessive-compulsive disorder; maybe it was a habit from reading literature because we were taught to annotate and look for meaning in all the tiny details.

Either way, by the time I started college, reading had become painstakingly

slow and difficult. A recommended book list on my phone continued to build up, a project I said I would start and never did. I had too many other personal projects, I told myself. It’s normal to lose interests and change passions, but I genuinely missed throwing myself into fantasy worlds or different realities. I missed the escapism and comfort that books offered. During this last winter, I finished a MacKenzie large project and found some extra time Brower on my hands, so I decided to choose a title from my book list that jumped out at me. I wanted to read something with advanced writing and ideas that would still appeal to my childhood interests. I chose Oscar Wilde’s novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,”which I knew had a lot of imagery and an interesting main character. My goal was to let the words flow; I wasn’t going to stop and deliberate on their meaning. It’s like I was learning how to read for fun again. The book is only 100 pages long, and it still took me longer to read than most people, but I finished it, a stepping stone in the right direction that’s given me momentum to read more. Rekindling my love for reading has been one of the hardest things to do because it’s like trying to be a kid again. Finding my old passion for books is going to take more than one short novel, but it’s worth the effort to once again explore new worlds.

MacKenzie Brower is a photojournalist. She is passionate about cultural diversity, climate change and the environment. Her goal is to travel and see the world through the lens of her camera.

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