Tyrant. Can. Read.
I've recently re-discovered my love for reading. I'd lost it. But I'm enjoying it again.

When I was a kid I read all the time. I loved it. My family moved around so much, I learned at an early age to entertain myself. I often found myself without any friends around to play with, and my little sister was, well, you just aren't supposed to like playing with your little sister. It's just not cool. So I found a friend in books filled with stories about people in many adventures. When it's hard to connect with real people that aren't around, sometimes make believe people will have to do.

I'm an extremely brilliant person, and I say that backing it up with the fact that I read well at an early age. My sister and I spent many summers participating in the local library summer reading programs in whatever city we lived in at the time. My mom would take us to the library every week to pick out the books we wanted to read that week. We'd mark them off on a sheet displayed proudly on the refrigerator, until the sheet was filled and we'd read the required number of books to win the prize. I don't remember now what any of the prizes were. Probably more books.

Going to the library was always a big, fun event for me. I was like a kid in a toy store, only my toys were books. I'd go straight to the 'Young Reader' section and look for any books I hadn't read, yet. I was reading 'big kid' books before I should have been able to understand them, and I felt very grown up to be reading books with less pictures and more words. I loved mysteries, so I quickly made my way through Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys books. I read lots of other books, but these are the books I can remember reading every week, a different book in the series, always looking forward to the next trip to the library so I could get the next book.

In fifth grade, my brilliance reached new heights. My claim to fame that year was that I was the first kid in fifth grade to figure out The Westing Game. I recently saw this book again at the bookstore, and memories of the event came rushing back to me, even though right now I have absolutely no idea what the book is about or the significance of figuring it out.

But in fifth grade, I read through the book quickly, and soon earned my name in chalk on the blackboard as the first, and one of the very few to figure out the twist in the story before my teacher explained it to the rest of the class. I was the envy of everyone for about a day, until some other kid won a record number of games of Four Square. Then my name in chalk soon lost all its significance to anyone other than me. My mom was proud, of course. She always knew I was brilliant, even before The Westing Game.

Highschool was the beginning of the end of my love for books and reading. Textbooks became required reading. I began to rue the day I longed for more words and less pictures. I was forced to spend my time reading about subjects like molecular whatnot, calculus formulas, historic battles of who-knows-where, and endless Canterbury Tales in an odd form of english that made no sense to me at all. Then came the great literary works, like Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, and countless Shakespeare plays, all of which made reading a huge, tedious effort just to understand the basic story. Once you got the story, then there was analyzing and dissecting and memorizing and tests. Tests on a book!

This took all the fun out of reading for me. I'd always liked to read because I chose things I liked to read, and I read on my own time. Now my time was consumed by these things I didn't want to read, and they made me feel much less brilliant than The Westing Game of yore.

Just when I thought the required reading would come to an end, as did highschool, college struck. With that came bigger textbooks about dirt and rocks and earthquakes in Geology, government and the economy in Economics and Political Science, rabbits and flora and fauna in Biology, and even textbooks on television and movies in my Film and Communications classes towards my major. None of this was of interest to me, except the TV and Film, and I prefered to handle that by watching TV and Films.

So, I stopped reading for fun, because it wasn't fun anymore. None of my professors ever put my name on the blackboard in chalk for finishing a chapter on the geography, topography, and economy of Zaire. Reading lost all of its luster.

But since I've been writing so much lately, I've also picked up reading for fun again. I'm not required to read anything for anything anymore, and now that I feel free to read what I want, when I want, I'm enjoying it again.

I like books. I love walking through a bookstore and seeing them all lined up on the shelves with their pretty covers. The smell of a bookstore is one of the best smells ever. I may like the look of books more than I like reading the books, but it does feel good to pick up a nice looking book and at least hold it for awhile, as though reading it.

I now have a stack of books that I'm looking forward to reading. It's a pretty stack of pretty books. And when that stack is gone, I'll make a new stack.

Maybe one day I'll have my own pretty book to add to the stack. I would love to read that, for sure.

C.T.