Reading is not fun

Rebeca Dias
6 min readJun 15, 2017
British Library

If you don’t like reading at all, I can tell you one thing that we both will probably agree: you have read the wrong books. Books that made you feel bored or sleepy or that made you think and think hard about something you didn’t want to. Yes, they do that. Books are terrible in that way.

I know there has been a multitude of texts, memes and all sorts of posters and materials of all kinds trying to convince people, young people mostly, that reading is fun, important and essential for your life. They are not wrong but, let me tell you, they are not entirely true. Sometimes reading is not fun. Sometimes a book will open a wound in you, a hole, a terrible thought. Sometimes it will drag you to the mud, it will take you to darker places (in some cases this place can be a profound and irresistible state of sleepiness, I admit), it will mess with your head, with your way of thinking, with your beliefs. Because this is what they do.

If you think fiction is just made up stories for pure entertainment, think about all the banned books in the world. All fiction. Yes, I’m including the Bible.

When I was young I was fascinated by the site of a full bookshelf. Even before I could read I would be impressed by my parents’ books, full of pages with no pictures, just lines and lines of different letters looking like really long ant lines going somewhere, never to end.

When I finally started reading, I was happy with my ability: to read aloud and say a whole bunch of things I hadn’t the slightest idea of what they meant. But I sounded so good.

The library is a good hiding place too (especially when you’re a kid with no friends in a new school). There’s silence, the lights are dimmed (at least the lights in my first library were that way) and there’s the sense of time cutting through and yet they are all there, intact. Books are timeless things. They have their own time. And if you don’t read them when you need them, it’s the worst.

It can’t be too soon either. If you read a book too early in life, you may hate the author, you may hate your teacher, you will probably just not get it at all. Read it too late and it can be as painful as hell when you think if only you knew it sooner. Books have their own time to be read too.

I’m not completely sure of exactly when I found out about what books could do to me. I just remember that they had a strange power. Suddenly, being grounded wasn’t so horrible anymore. Being alone. Being in silence. I would open a book and get myself inside somebody else’s life. My life ceased to exist for a period of time that could be years, decades, centuries… It all depended on the book I was reading. Suddenly waiting for my parents to pick me up was not so lonely. Being the last kid to go home was just fine. I wouldn’t even notice it. I was deep down into a mystery, a detective novel, a teenage life, someone else’s romance that did or did not work. And if it sucked… Well it’s not my life after all. I could come back to my reality anytime I wanted. Most of them ended happily. Not all of them.

I remember reading a story book when I was still a kid — it was called “The girl with the matchbox” (or something like that); I did it twice and it just didn’t make sense to me. Years later thinking about it I realized why I didn’t understand it.

— If you are into fairy tales, beware! major SPOILER ALERT-

The girl died in the end. It took me years. I never expected a fairytale to end like that. But this one did. And I only realized that when I read another book that did not end well either. And so it began.

No, reading is not always fun. Many times it will give you nightmares and will keep you up at night thinking if you should just give it up. Other times it will be difficult but you will endure all the way to the very end because you desperately want to know what happens next. Even when none of it is, or ever was, true.

I’m one of those strange women who own more books than shoes or clothes, or any other accessories for that matter. No, I’m not so proud of them, mostly because I haven’t read them all. And being terribly frightened of becoming a hoarder, I decided to also collect the virtual ones. I’m not interested in the smell of the paper or the feeling of a nice brochure cover (although these things nicely done are indeed delightful), but it’s the content that matters the most to me in the end. The magic portal that opens when I’m out, into a stranger’s life again. In that particular moment, doesn’t matter if the pages smell musty or vanilla, if it is a kindle paperwhite or the 2007 version that marvelled even the almighty Oprah. If it opens the damn door, it just doesn’t matter. I’ll step inside and leave the real world for a minute. Or ten.

Sometimes I spend long periods without reading anything. What we call adult life gets in the way and meetings, deadlines, projects and work stop me from getting back to it. And then, I slowly start to feel that there’s something very very wrong with me or the world around me that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something missing. I call my distant relations to say hi. Send a text to my bff from high school. It’s all great but the feeling is still there. The world seems just smaller. I get anxious. Sad. Dissatisfied. My problems just get bigger and bigger. And then I remember to open one of my books. It’s late at night, I’m tired and I have to wake up early tomorrow. But in the fifteen minutes, more or less, that I spend getting again involved in yet another story, things in my life start to get smaller again and not so terrible. And even if “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”, I’m all there, because I’ve been there before and I survived and I lived through others.

No, friends, reading isn’t always fun. Reading many times makes you go to places you would never go alone and feel things you would never have felt and have ideas that were never before in your mind. Or maybe even worse, you find out that your huge, enormous issue that you thought nobody would ever understand is just there. Explained in black and white. And if you’re lucky enough, it may even be illustrated. And that shock alone puts you in a place where you can see many others just like yourself.

And there you have it. That’s why I can never get enough of them. That’s why I collect them and buy them and borrowed them and try not to steal them. It is because these other lives talk to me. They help and encourage me to see my own life in a different perspective. Bad books help too. They show me how boring a writer is sometimes. They are not always clever and fun. They also make mistakes. They can be cheesy or cheeky and you can love or hate them but for that, you must listen to them first. Reading may not be fun. But neither is figuring out life on your own. And books are there for you.

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Rebeca Dias

teacher, journalist, reader, writer.