I like Reading, Sort of

I don’t love reading.  It’s ok, a decent way to pass some time.  Let’s say better than most TV, but not a mediocre movie (Patrick Swayze will always trump Hemingway).  My mom is big reader, a former english teacher.  My dad is not, and with a wink from my historical “I”, I of course fall in the middle.  But why then am I an English major (something I’ve asked myself even more than my parents)?  I think the answer is split into two parts.  The part I’m focusing on, even though it is the main topic of this post, only accounts for a minuscule portion of the decision.  The big part, what some might call the ‘real reason’ I am a English major is because I like Shakespeare to write.  Boring, self-explanatory, moving on.  But the other part, despite being minor, speaks to the revelatory aspect of literacy.  The way it can give someone agency in their life, a thirst for knowledge and the means to quench it.  This second part, as you have probably already guessed, is Harry Potter.  My mother is to blame.  She bought me the first three Harry Potter’s, possibly because she was an English teacher whose son spent most of his time making friends watching SNL reruns.  Of course (=excuse), I was young. I read those books and got hooked, like many other people my age did.  But the books themselves didn’t do too much for me.  They are fun, but not life changing.  It was the time in between the books that changed me.  As every Harry Potter fan knows, there is usually about a two year break, sometimes longer, between each book and my hyper eleven year old self filled those initial Harry Potter hiatuses by reading other books.  Crazy books for an eleven year-old; Vonnegut, Shakespeare, even The Old Man and the Sea.  And, after about a solid year or so of reading my mom’s classics and my sister’s college books, I totally burned out and stopped cold.  Until college.  When I decided I wanted to read for the next four years of my life.