Exploration
Let’s face it, as much as some of us may want to travel all over the world, we won’t be able to hit all the places praised in popular travel blogs. Whether it be a limited budget, family restraints, or a pandemic (ugh), we’ll mostly be stationed at our home base. This is where books have helped me escape - either to different cities where I can get coffee at a local café and take a romantic walk in the park, or to a different time altogether. One day I can attend an 18th century ball in England, only to find later that week I’m on a scientific mission to discover a new planet, realizing their intelligent beings are human-sized spiders.
Curiosity
First, let me make clear that I’m not the type of person that retains every word I read. Far from it actually. Just because I read a 450 page book on how the body works doesn’t mean I’ve memorized every part of the brain and can tell you what each part does. It usually goes like this:
Kayla reads a chapter on the brain.
Kayla thinks to herself, “Oh, that is really cool.” Then, she’ll tell her friends about it.
The next week she’s at her local bar’s trivia night with said friends and they ask a question about the brain.
Kayla thinks, “Hmmm… I should know this.” But she doesn’t, and they lose trivia. Her friends look at her in disbelief.
Then what’s the point in reading it? A lot of people assume non-fiction books read like text books from back in school. At least, that is what I had initially assumed. But then I found a book that changed that perspective forever. I’m not going to tell you what that book was because I think each person needs to find their niche - this one just happened to be mine. Instead think about what makes you curious. Haven’t you ever found yourself wondering things like, “Why do peacocks have such elaborate feathers?” or “What actually are natural flavors in flavored water?”. When you find your book, the next thing to remember is while reading, be awed in the present. Don’t focus on trying to actually remember anything - it’s not like I was expecting to do brain surgery the next day.
Perspective & Guidance
Sometimes I find myself wanting to change my habits, or attempting to gain perspective. These types of books just aren’t in your bookstore’s “Self-Help” section (although I can definitely name a few good ones). For me, most of my self-help books have been in the form of Memoirs. I started off with a celebrity memoir and to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. I’m not into their lifestyle in the first place, and picking up the book was the equivalent of picking up a tabloid in the grocery store checkout line. But I had already purchased it on a whim, so I’d might as well make my money’s worth. Needless to say, my opinion changed. Memoirs not only can make me laugh out loud and cry from page to page, but they can be so relatable and help you gain that perspective I was talking about in the first place. I’ve reflected more reading Memoirs than any other genre of book.
Pleasure
One of the greatest treasures of reading is simply how much pleasure it gives us. Yes, I still find pleasure in exploring, satisfying my curiosity, and gaining perspective, but sometimes I just want to get lost in a story to the point where I feel like I’m living it. For my husband, I’m sure he feels this way when he reads a thriller or a science fiction book. For me, some of my favorites are the books most people would categorize as “guilty pleasures” or “beach reads”. Some others may be sexy fantasies, stories that give me nightmares, or even young fiction/fantasy.
At some point in my childhood, after learning to read and continuing to do so, I stopped. I had to wait until the 6th grade before I would get the reading itch again. At the time, my homeroom teacher realized it would take more than a firm voice to calm down her rambunctious class of 25 to get them to focus on studies. One day she had brought in a book, sat on a stool, and without even telling us to take our seats and quiet down, she started reading:
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
When our teacher reached the part in the story where we realized this boy lived in a cupboard under the stairs, every single one of us were trapped in her story-telling trance. She read us the entire book that school season, and when we came back after break she read us the second. When she wouldn’t read us the third, and we started to whine and complain, she insisted we read it ourselves. I basically ran home that day, grabbed old birthday money, and ran to Borders to buy “Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Askaban”. I read the entire book that weekend.
A good book will do that to you.