| Reading is not just a hobby. It is the fire that keeps me burning, it is an addiction- one that I am not willing to give up and am glad I do not have to. Books to me are like nicotine to a heavy smoker, reading them is a luxury and the ultimate source of pleasure. All my life, I have surrounded myself with books, mostly novels. I know the characters in every novel I have read as though they were my best friends. As I lay my eyes upon the first words of every book, a shiver of excitement runs through me like adrenaline at the thought of embarking on a new journey. When I read, I am immersing myself in a world where I know that somewhere out there, there is hope, love and adventure. Books are my escape from the burden of reality. To some, reading is tiresome. To me, however, reading is passionate. For myself, reading is a a very private thing. Do not get me wrong: I am extremely proud of the fact that I have probably read about a thousand books in my fifteen years of a lifetime, so much so that some have dubbed me a nerd. Reading is private to me in a sense that when I am in the midst of losing myself in the pages of a book, I become greatly annoyed when someone, like my mother for example, barges into my reading space (which could be my room) for whatsoever reason and disrupts the world of which I had tapped into. In order for myself to completely experience the story in which each book beholds, I require myself to be detached from the real world, whereby all five senses are to be dulled and almost deactivated. While reading, I should eat nothing, hear only silence, smell nothing but odorless air, see nothing but the book in front of me and touch only the book and the soft material of the couch on which I am sitting on (and, if you are going to be ridiculously specific, I should also feel the cloth of my clothes as well). This is the reason why I rarely read in public spaces. In some stories, whereby both storyline and use of skill to portray it are excellent, I find myself getting quite emotional when the story does not turn out quite how I expect it to be (for example, a character dies when I didn't want him/her/it to). Few authors are able to attain such high levels of excellence, but I am privileged to have found some books written by such authors that have succeeded in making me tear. To name a few such books would be The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Both are worldwide bestselling books. Personally, I am not a fan of tragic endings but ironically enough, both the aforementioned books, which are my favourites so far, are tragedies in my opinion. Some would beg to differ (that they are tragedies), but you would have to be the judge when you read them (that is, if you do read them). I believe that the irony can be explained: Most books/novels/novellas that I have read so far have predictable happy endings. It is the twist in the plot, or the rarely-wielded artful skill these authors have (which most others may not have) in unveiling such an unpopular, risky ending and making it popular again, or maybe the unforgettable few moments where I stubbornly cling on to the thin thread of hope that the tragedies would avert, or even the mere creativeness of the story itself that make reading such highly-acclaimed yet tragic books a memorable experience. |
