Rediscovering the love of reading

The title of this piece might sound incongruous to those who know me. Friends have explained away the huge bags (or knapsacks) I carry to the couple of books I’ve stashed inside. I’d rather read on a long commute than chat in my cell. And with writing and editing as a profession, it’s a no-brainer that I’d always be perusing words on the printed page, if not on the World Wide Web.

Now for the confession: while it is true that I’ve never stopped reading, a huge chunk of it for the past ten years was work-related. Research work for an article I’m about to pen. Background context for this famous person I’m about to interview. Or maybe just the necessary homework that you’d have to bone up on every single day just to remain knowledgeable in your field. Then there were the four years of taking up my graduate studies in Journalism (it should have been just two years, but I was juggling education with work).

Reading became a duty, not a delight. If I had to entertain myself or relieve some of the work-related stress, I’d gorge myself on DVDs during the weekend.
Maybe that’s why it took a sabbatical for me to return to my first love. A one-year corporate stint that saw me keeping regular hours, where I’d report promptly at 9 a.m. in the morning and return at 7 p.m. (My lifestyle before that was 18-hour workdays that had me leaping out of bed at 8 a.m. and crashing at 2 a.m.).

Because I slowed down (in a manner of speaking), my intellect was able to breathe. All of a sudden, the pressure to read all the stuff that I ‘had to’ read disappeared – and wonderfully replaced by a growing awareness of passions, preferences, and interests I had buried deep inside my psyche. I could pull back and “feel” within the things that were precious to my heart. And since the internal had to find something external to connect to and nourish it, I found myself gravitating again back to books.

This time, reading became not only a delight, but a manner of self-expression and of self-discovery. As I escaped into new worlds and grasped concepts and ideas that held me inthrall, I re-connected to my inner soul – and the words of my fellow writers became their fuel.

Now there is a downside to this – I’ve been on a binge the past two months. I’ve been buying a bestseller or a thriller almost every week – and when the craving is intense, it’s been a real bear clamping down on the temptation to download those hard-to-find books in my Kindle in my PC.

Yes, we’re talking about those thousands of books that can’t be found in a bookstore in the Philippines but which now can be downloaded in my precious laptop (sans the purchase of an Ipad or a Kindle). Downloading them means also saving on those outrageous shipping costs. As a friend and fellow book reader said, it’s a paradise – but bad news for our credit cards.

That, however, is for another post.