For Christmas this past December, I received a Kindle from my parents as a gift. Having always loved the solidness of books, I was wary as to whether I could switch to reading from page to screen seamlessly. Four months later, I could tell you all of the pros and cons to book versus Kindle, but that’s not the lesson I would like to impart.
When I was in high school, reading was my sanctuary. I could get lost in the hundreds of books I stashed on various shelves, in desk drawers and under my bed. I’d go to the local library on lunch breaks and spend weekends at Barnes & Noble, lost for hours in the shelves. However, college and life came with its own requirements for my time, and small apartments and dorm rooms didn’t provide an apt environment for my vastly growing library. In turn, I began to grow out of my pastime and only picked up a few books a year when I had a little extra time on my hands.
Since obtaining my Kindle, I decided to attempt to read 100 books in 2016, and I am currently on my 26th. I have an entire world of novels at my fingertips, and it’s changing the way that I live my life. What I have learned from accepting this challenge for myself has been positively rewarding, and I hope that it encourages some of you to pick up a little extracurricular reading of your own in any form you please.
First, I noticed that my daily verbiage improved vastly. Instead of speaking in the common slang that becomes habit in our social media driven society, I began to pick up new words and try to improve upon the way I presented myself through speech. When you constantly see words telling a story, you realize their importance and their impact.
Second, I found some of my own stagnant creativity lurking in the pages of some of my new reads. Since January, I have written more, drawn more and photographed more than I have in the past few years. As someone who works creatively to make a living, using those skills becomes commonplace and tiresome. It is so important to find projects that help to keep the juices flowing. Losing myself in someone else’s imagination has helped me immensely to find my own.
Lastly, I find that reading gives me new perspective on situations. On any given day, it’s difficult to understand why people do the things that they do. It helps to realize that we are all different, and we all have unique and refreshing perspectives. There’s nothing like 400 pages from someone else’s mind to show you a viewpoint you may have overlooked. You may even discover that it can help you solve a few problems you’ve been struggling to understand.
