Do you wish to read THAT book on your shelf, but postponing it for any reason?

Here’s a personal story of mine why I chose to read books and what difference I harvested out of it!

Imagine in the year 2003 a puny 7-year-old young girl in her 2nd grade living in the rural region of Chennai (India), who is still struggling a lot in the early academics and trying to find a way out to remember all the spelling of the words in this complex language called English. Vividly, I recall certain hard words, namely 'smuggling' and 'afforestation, knocking a nightmare out of me.

(Jump-cut to 2007)

Although I did my schooling in English, the fear of handling the language was omnipresent. The trend of being anxious to handle communication in the English language continued further due to the fact that I had not acquired the fluency standards of the peer group. So, this is not about how I improved my English, but rather how books enriched my well-being, backing me up in the closest quarters, when everything else faded away a bit too much.

In due course, during my 6th grade, our family shifted to a different region of the city, where my father insisted I use the lending library, although I was hesitant about it. Until then, books meant only the books associated with schools.

Then out of the blue, I went to the lending library and borrowed a couple of books from the Mary-Kate & Ashley series namely : a) Sweet 16: my best friend's boyfriend; b) So Little Time: just between us. This is one of the bestsellers of that time, dealing with the twin sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley living life on their own terms, fully independent, like a beautiful American dream.

During the first read, I could not decipher a lot and had to look for the meaning of numerous words in the dictionary on every single page. In due course of time, while I reached the fourth or fifth book in the same series, over a period of 3-4 months, slowly I could feel that I got the vibe of the book, and now I could contextually understand the meaning of the unknown word. After that, I tried to check the meaning of those unknown words in the dictionary. It turned out, to my surprise, that the meaning of those words was pretty close, although not accurate. That was indeed an EUREKA moment and I felt it was truly magical !???

This one single aspect of reading a book kept my inclination alive, and the trend continued: I gathered up almost all the books in the Mary-Kate and Ashley series in that lending library, and the price that I pay to read these books is 5%–10% of the books' original price, and I could own the book for about 14 days (may be sometimes longer than that without paying a penalty, as I befriended the librarian really well over the months), and it counts around 15–25 INR for every fortnight, while I get about 5 INR as pocket money per day from my dad in the year 2007.

The contents of the book series also made me think outside the box and motivated me to be extravagantly free-spirited, which conditioned my mind to think beyond the conventional beliefs of my culture and background, which up to this day I believe has been instrumental in shaping my personality into what I am today.

The love for book-reading kept flowing smoothly like a slice of butter in a heated pan, and I explored different genres like history, time travel, crime, love, and others of that sort, as well as different languages (TAMIL: my mother tongue).

As can be seen, It was my teenage years when I took up book reading seriously as a default part of my everyday life, and I am sure that it made my mind pretty sane and helped me escape the classic pitfalls of adolescence, and it surely lacquered my personality with empathy, compassion, logical reasoning, and all the other soft skills that I could think of at the moment.

To name a few of my very favorites to this day in varied genres: Angels and Demons (Dan Brown), Wise and Otherwise (Sudha Murthy), She swiped right into my heart (Sudeep Nagarkar), Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom), TAMIL language: Vanavasam (Kannadasan), Moondram ulaga por (Vairamuthu).

As the years passed by and the era of smartphones kept swiftly crawling into our homes, I must admit honestly that I had a decreased affinity for paper books until maybe 2016 or so. And then again, a point of realization struck straight on my cerebrum, and from there, I am still incessantly in love with books in hardcover format.

As a result of clinging tightly to this habit, I can vouch that in daily life, my expression of the language (both English and Tamil - my mother tongue) has shaped itself tremendously better, and the sense to put out a thought to the person on the other end,? is very well-articulated within the brain before I blurt it out. More or less, I feel that my language has begun to be organized and structured while I try to convey something.

?And because of this clarity in thought and expression, in the year 2017 during my master's program, I had abundant opportunities to practice public speaking in the form of presenting seminars to my fellow classmates, anchoring for department activities, and so on.

I realized this was my true calling - To be on the forefront to present something to the crowd (when I am clear with the technical subject) feels blissful to my inner soul. It felt so innate to my being, and it came to me very indigenous. I am sure reading books was the only factor that made this feasible.

From there on till now in 2023, I am a PhD student in inorganic chemistry, and you could visualize how many instances might have come my way in which I have to systematically present to the crowd my thoughts and opinions in the form of presentations in conferences, oral examinations, etc., and I have been a confident individual in expressing myself lucidly while simultaneously being an empathetic speaker to the spectators of varied kinds and hierarchy.

Final icing on the cake is my ability to write, which again I will honestly bestow all the due credits to the numerous books I have read over the years. It was in the year 2016, a teacher of mine Ms. Swarna Vidhya who notified me that I might have a knack for writing, provided I put in enough effort in polishing this skill, and she has been my critic now and then. Thanks to her.

Although I did not take meticulous efforts in bettering my writing skill, I must say that I have always tried to stay in touch with the art of writing, with a bleak hope that someday I might write better and match my own expectations.

This habit of writing is also very addictive, that I wish to write down (scribble) everything as much as I could, like scribbling on a notepad while speaking over a phone call is a great stress-buster to me. It is easily understandable that PhD research is tagged along with a lot of academic writing, and this craze for writing has surely given me a leg-up in this segment.

Although now I fall short of words to express what book reading has done to my overall being and how I would have handled life pretty hastily if book reading was eliminated from the whole equation of life. That’s how I wish to make the curtains fall!

I will be glad to hear back your comments and feedback on this piece of writing.

Share it with people to whom you think might like this kind of stuff, maybe to rekindle their dwindling desire to read books.

Happy Reading mates!?

What is that one book that made your life 1 degree (slightly) better?

P.S - My current read:

1.DON'T TRUST YOUR GUT by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

2.A RIVER CALLED TIME by Courttia Newland are my current reads.