The reason I read books (part 1)

Do you like reading books? When I was a high school student, I would have said, NO, I DON’T AT ALL. But now, I will say, YES, I LOVE TO READ! So, what happened to this man. Today, I’d like to write about why I became a huge book lover even though I nearly hated reading when I was a high schooler.

I can easily remember my high school days. I hate readings. When I bought a magazine, I don’t read anything but looking at some pictures, or checking a horoscope page (even though the magazine was a fashion magazine…and that’s why I still am not good at choosing fashionable outfits…). Anyway, the letters are so small, and the words I read looked seriously boring like reading an explanatory note on old electric dictionary. In short, I hated it. Newspaper seemed the same. Why are letters in newspapers are so small, and boring news that much? I had no idea why they are producing such a boring things to the world. So, I loved watching TV. Everything I learned from was TV. The topic or trivia I talk to a hairdresser was all from information by TV. But somehow I was said like “Oh, you really know much about almost anything. You are excellent! boy”. So, I never felt any guilts of not reading books.

During my high school days, there was a boy who is always reading during short break. Everyone was chatting with friends, or going out to buy some drinks, but he was always reading books. And he was an honor student. There was a different types of honor student. He belongs to soccer club, and he was a kind of “naughty” boy. Listening music during class, chewing gum secretly. So, he was popular with girls. He was in relationship with really cute girl. He seemed not studying hard, but he made really good score in every term examinations. And, he also was reading book during recess with chewing gum.

And, I somehow became a university student. Ironically, my major was English literature. Like the most of student who try to major it, I misunderstood that I could be trained to be a real fluent English speaker. We study literature, in other word, we read English books. I was almost becoming panic since I didn’t finish reading any literature before (I’m feeling so bad for today’s system of entering university though).

The first books I needed to read was “The Scarlet Letter” in Japanese. Since I didn’t have any knowledges on these literature, my reaction was “what the heck of this super ultra boring dictionary like thick book??”. Sorry. But, yes. I couldn’t understand the beauty of literature at all. Then, a professor said very interesting thing is a class. The 60 years old looking man said to us, freshmen, “All you have to do in this university time is reading books as much as you can. You need to read as much as possible. I’m serious. There are books that you can read only in this time. You need to try to read more difficult books that you felt you would’t read. First 20 to 30 books would be boring, but there will come time when you feel it’s so interesting. So, once again, read books.” or like that.

Then, I finally thought, all right, I would do it. I clicked every second hand books that seems fun to me on Amazon, and almost next day, just before my entrance door was full of Amazon packages (I should have taken picture though, I thought that was a surprise or something like that). And then, I realized what the professor said to me was so right. After finishing 15 books, I could somehow understand how great thing to read, and I totally regretted having not read many books until I became university student.

Thank you very much for reading the article. I would prefer your comments or some other topic requests for me to write. Please write a comment or give me an email through contact page.

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