“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Booking Through Thursday: Volume
Would you say that you read about the same amount now as when you were younger? More? Less?
Why?

This is a tricky question, really! I’m pretty sure I read more when I was younger—at least when it came to actual “volume”, ie number of pages or words actually read. I still read, but I don’t think I read as much, and it’s mostly because of time constraints—work, the internet, trying to write porn fiction fanfiction—and I’m pretty sure what I read now is much less dense than what I read when I was younger.

Hah, that didn’t make much sense, did it.

The “why” part is probably harder to answer. This is also where I ramble, and not really answer the question!

I learned to read when I was five. Or somewhere around that age, because I think I was already able to read when I was in kindergarten. I suppose that’s nothing special; a lot of kids learn to read early. I started with the usual kid books—those Ladybird books, and then I graduated to Enid Blyton and similar books for younger children. Somewhere between the ages ten to eighteen, I managed to skip the whole young adult range of books: at that point, I’d never read the Narnia books, I had no interest in Anne of Green Gables and the subsequent books, I had no idea that The Dark is Rising sequence existed, I had no clue that there was this woman called Diana Wynne Jones who wrote hysterically funny and really clever books about magic.

I started clambering over my father’s bookshelf when I finished the Enid Blyton books and ended with books by Tolstoy and Hemingway and Steinback. He had all the old editions of the Penguin Classics like the Iliad and The Travels of Marco Polo, and books translated from Arabic and multitude of dictionaries. So I ended up reading those books instead (I never finished Anna Karenina, but hey, I was twelve). I went to boarding school when I was almost thirteen, and I guess the trend continued, except that I found fantasy and science fiction books, and I pretty much latched on to those until I finished school.

I did read some YA books then, but it never dawned to me to categorise them as such. I remember Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was required reading when I was in the second or third form. But I read awfully few of them, that’s for sure.

I went to university. I struggled to find time to read—I was an engineering major and I had no required language classes, so most of my reading time found me stuck in some horribly thick tome of Theoretical Mechanics and the like. I barely read, then.

Somewhere along the way between graduating and getting a job, I began reading the Harry Potter books, thanks to my mother, who bought them for my youngest sister, who was then around fifteen. (She’s almost eight years younger than me.) It was only at that point I realised that there was this whole niche for this type of fiction, and I wondered why I never noticed this before. I started alternating between my fantasy books and these new YA books I found, and I found myself enjoying them a lot, probably even more than the fantasy series that were pretty much my staple diet when it came to reading.

So that’s what I read now—mostly young adult fiction, and that’s what you’ll find on my bookshelf. So maybe in terms of sheer number of books, it would look like I am reading a greater number of books now, but the books are thinner and the text is larger, so I’d hesitate to say that I’m reading more. But I do enjoy what I read now, and that’s more important, don’t you think? :)