On Reading

I have been reading books again (thankfully). 

In high school, my friends and I would read novel after novel. I always had a novel at assembly, hidden somewhere in my books during prep, on my bed, and sometimes I would sneak glances at my novel during classes. I read just about everything I could get my hands on, a habit I picked up from my mother. She made us read the newspapers from cover to cover, bought us books, and read with us sometimes. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of me curled up with her in her bed, reading Elechi Amadi’s “The Concubine” under very poor light because load shedding was part of life and we couldn’t very well put the book down. 

So when I joined a secondary school with a large diverse library that went beyond the Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew I had had to endure in primary school, I was ecstatic. I read the Perry Mason books and wished to be a lawyer (funny how life turns out – at the time, I thought by now I would be in medical school well on my way to being a paedetrician). I read the simple books with cautionary tales about sex, drugs and alcohol from the Ugandan writers. I read the classics by Austen, Hardy, Bronte, Ludlum, Grisham, Archer, Cornwell, Baldacci, Patterson, etc. I read little known authors. I read historical romances and the little Harlequin and Silhouette books that gave us a version of sex education that was not “Don’t have sex: you’ll get pregnant, get AIDS, and die.” Somewhere along the way, I ran out of books to read and ended up reading the Reader’s Digests because someone had scared me off Stephen King (I’m now playing catch up). It was a lovely time of my life. 

I think that is how I learned not to take things so seriously. I always had a novel character’s worries on my mind to distract me. I couldn’t worry too much about my Chemistry marks when I had to pray that Todd Belknap (The Bancroft Strategy) make it out of whichever position he had gotten himself into. I couldn’t be heart broken when I had Norah Roberts’ wonderful leading men to love at night. Books kept me sane, drove me a little insane, and made me laugh and cry, made me stronger and better. 

Social media has been coming between us of late. Every time I would open a book in the last few years, I would remember a Facebook message I haven’t responded to. Then there was Twitter and Instagram beckoning to me, to make fun of people and or share new ideas. And of course there’s almost always a Whatsapp message asking for attention. It’s only today as I read Chimamanda Adieche’s Purple Hibiscus, with Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass in my bag to aid my taxi journeys, having finished George R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones yesterday, that it finally hit me. 

I understood (again) why I love to read. It’s not only the fact that I enjoy the build up…the way an author creates these people who feel so real that you can almost touch them. It’s not even the little battles you conquer with these characters, the love you finally gain and the hurdles you skip. It’s the way an author shows us everyone’s soul. It’s that comforting thought that everybody is doing the best they can, the best they know how to do. It’s that pardon that almost every author grants their characters: that they are only human. I don’t have that grace in real life of course; but I do think I’m forgiving easier for it. The happy endings also help a lot since I keep looking forward to my happy ending. To me, every bad situation is just that middle part of the book where the bad stuff happens and the only reason I still pick up the book is to find that ending. The ending, whether happy or not, always gives some amount of closure. I believe that is what we are all looking for at the end of a long long hard day.