Random rants on reading

I've grown a passion for reading and fallen in love with them, which made me realize a few things. To begin with, being a reader does not make me a superior person. I first got into reading to find a space to confide in, a world to escape and to heal. But as I read, I became more and more fascinated to learn others' perspectives, to understand their view influenced from their life experience, which differs from mine, it's like acquainting new friends from all over the world. Friends, however, in real life, take time to get to learn about each other. 

Biography was the first genre that got me into reading as it led me from one book to another. Through Becoming, as a black student from Chicago, Michelle opened up her awkwardness to mix with other white students in Princeton and was very conscious of her skin color before. Know My Name opened my eyes in so many ways; a victim of sexual assault shared her journey to fight for justice in court and the dark side of sexual assault victim that has never occurred to us. No matter how strong someone appears to be and how loud her voice is, the trauma will find her all through her life, constantly. 

I have always admired how the writer constructs her sentences in such an eloquent way. Just as Mahathir taught her daughter that observing how people write books is was the best way to learn the language. Although every so often, I missed it and skimmed the book rather quickly and noted on the vital point only so I could finish the book faster and excitedly grab another book. Writers who write expressible words never cease to amaze me. Explaining every simple thing in complexity, yet relatable because nothing is plain in this complicated world, take Virginia Woolf as an example. Honestly, it wasn't easy, explaining one evening preparing for a party in 300 pages, was it? You get to feel more and closer to the characters through their expansive vocabulary. They always find the right words to express their thoughts clearly, which I aspire to be. 

The more I spend my time reading and listening to others' thoughts and views, I learn to humble myself. There are also a few times the authors' views contradicted mine, and it wasn't easy to stay unbiased throughout the book. People who read books also tend to have references and reasons behind their opinions instead of following and parroting what they heard blindly to please the majority. They are also more open-minded go beyond their own comfort zone and explore other's cultures instead of staying in the one-minded community, take Tariq Ramadhan and Omar Said Ghobbash, for instance. It opened my mind, broke my stereotypes; things that I could never imagine to occur to me before. Just as Tara Westover has difficulty pronouncing holocaust in her class and upsets her professor and classmates, she was horrified and shocked to realize her ignorance once she researched the word. Precisely how I felt as I read more books. Why, why I didn't start reading earlier. I feel I was left behind and have a lot to catch up on after many years being kept under the shells. 

Suppose there's one thing I could've done differently looking back, I wish I had invested more of my youth with books by, reading more beneficial resources, being a librarian instead of prefect, spending my school time in the library instead of yelling at students for being late. It just feels personally closer to the adult me.