What Reading Means to Me, Part III: Adulthood

Continuing on from What Reading Means to Me, Part II: The Teenage Years.

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

During Christmas break from university at age 18, I browsed the shelves of Ottaker’s book shop (they later merged with Waterstones). There I found Bitten, reminding me of The Bloody Chamber with its female werewolf protagonist, I bought and read it in a number of hours, soon returning for the sequel.

This was the beginning of me taking full control over what and how much I read, the quantity of which increased so much I had to set a financial limit.

What Reading Means to Me, Part II: The Teenage Years

Continuing on from What Reading Means to Me, Part I: The Early Years.

Secondary school (age 11-16) introduced me to the classics. Well, tragic classics:

• Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
• Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare)
• The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson)
• The Signalman (Dickens)
• An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

The last was a stark lesson in the importance of treating people well, how you’d want to be treated, to avoid being responsible for harmful repercussions of my actions experienced by others.

But it wasn’t until I studied for my A-levels (age 16-18), after choosing English Literature and Psychology, that reading really changed me.

What Reading Means to Me, Part I: The Early Years

Reading has been ever-present in my life. It’s had a destructive, educational, and inspirational effect.

As a child my favourite time of day was bedtime. Supper was two biscuits and milk followed by fast teeth-brushing and then hopping into my Forever Friends covered single bed while anxiously waiting for my mother to squeeze in and join me. Every time she visited friends and family far away from home, leaving me in the incompetent hands of my father, she would apologise by bringing home Ladybird fairy tale books. Every night she’d read to me in various animated voices, firing up my imagination by breathing life into each character.