Why I Hated Reading and What Changed

At age nine I remember plodding over to one of the bright red arm chairs in the living room of my childhood home. I would slump down into the seat would make my feeble attempt at continuing to read Old Yeller. Considered a classic with numerous awards under its belt, my mother encouraged me to read it. She told me I would enjoy it. But each page was brutal. Every time I sat down to read all the joy was sucked out of the room. The next hour of my life would be eaten up by rereading the same page five times because I would keep zoning out. Throughout all my years of schooling I have been subjected to the miserable task of forced reading. Or as many teachers call it, “Required Reading.”

I never finished Old Yeller, thanks to growing up homeschooled until age eleven. My mother was my only teacher and her rule about books was that we had to read at least the first fifty pages before giving up on a book. I begrudgingly abided her rule and stumbled to the end of the first fifty pages of Old Yeller before discarding it. Unfortunately, the frustration I felt for reading did not stop at Old Yeller. It oozed into nearly every aspect of reading. I loved listening to my mother read books, but when it came to reading on my own, I can only remember a handful of books as a kid that held my attention, let alone those I was “required” to read.

The reading curriculum my mother used while I was homeschooled had lots of different books. Or, at the very least, it had lots of different non-fiction and fiction books. I enjoyed looking at the covers of books, but the thought of actually cracking open a book and reading it gave me a headache. I remember my mother reading books like Island of the Blue Dolphins to us on school days. It is remarkable how much I disliked reading on my own but how I loved the time sitting on the sofa while my mom read to us. In fact, I enjoyed it so much I just wanted to listen to her read all day (although partly because I wanted to avoid doing any more math homework). As a child who loved art, coloring, and dreamed of being a pop star I avoided reading at every turn.

My older brother, Casey, didn’t make the situation any easier. He had the uncanny ability to fly through books. Only a year apart, we would begin reading at the same time and he would be done ten or even twenty minutes before I was. I would helplessly watch him close his book and begin an afternoon of play. It was infuriating. I would try so hard to focus and read as quickly as possible. But many times, I was so intent on thinking about reading that I wasn’t actually reading. This made reading a chore even when I half enjoyed the book. It was boring, slow, and frustrating.

How did eleven-year-old-Elizabeth go from hating reading, to dreaming of being a full-time author?

All it took was finding the right book.

When I went into my first traditional school in sixth grade I had never experienced choosing a book on my own. Everything I had read up until that point had been picked out for me by my parents. Their enthusiasm about reading made me believe I liked reading, even though I didn’t. My middle school library was very small but it was the first place where a wide variety of books were presented to me -free for the taking. Encouraged by an English assignment, I ventured into the library. I found a handful of science fiction books that were enjoyable, but my reading career didn’t take off until I discovered the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

Reading The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan, was like taking a gateway drug. I fell in love with the world. I couldn’t put the book down. The mythology and magic enticed me. The characters and quirky dialogue kept my attention. As soon as I finished the first book, I hunted down the second and then third until I inhaled all five books in the series. It was an incredible break through. I was asking permission to leave lunch early to go up to the library to find the next book before scurrying back down to spend the last three minutes of lunch reading. The ravenous excitement that had awakened inside me was alien. And it was intoxicating.

As soon as I had finished the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series I anxiously searched for a new addiction. My eye caught on a detailed drawing of a beautiful dragon book cover on one of the library shelves. A scan and a smile later, I was reading Eragon the first book in the Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini. The magic, dragons, and action were a cocktail of wonder in my mind. When I made it to the last book in the series, Inheritance, I proudly carried the 860-page book to all my classes, letting everyone gape at the sheer mass of the bible sized book. With every book, I enjoyed the hatred I had harbored towards reading slowly disappeared.

Reading was not just a collection of chapters I was supposed to read for a grade anymore. It was a movie inside my head every time I opened these books. And even when I would close them or go to sleep at night, my mind poured through every detail of what I had read. I read almost exclusively young adult fantasy/science fiction books. I ended up reading more than forty books for fun during my three years of middle school. These books were not small, mind you. The page numbers for each book would vary from the high 200s to 6-700 pages. I was reading so much that I began waking up an hour earlier than anyone else in my house to read while I ate breakfast. All the sudden I couldn’t walk past a book store without getting weak in the knees. I became jealous of the main character in the movie Matilda because she got to spend her days at the library, bringing trolleys of books home each day.

It sounds incredible, doesn’t it? I read one book, and all the sudden I love reading everything.

I only wish it was that simple.

I had found a book I loved and introduced me to hundreds of books like it that I loved too. But that did not mean I loved reading everything. In fact, “required” reading continued to be a struggle for me. Award winning books like The Bronze Bow (a particular kind of torture in seventh grade), A Christmas Carrol (I am sorry, but this book made me want to pull my hair out), Fahrenheit 451 (I have a long rant about this one), The Old Man and the Sea (Again, I am so sorry, but I didn’t like this one either), and many others were some of the longest hours of my life. I remember trying (emphasis on trying) to read Lord of the Flies. At times, I would gag at the sheer amount of frustrated anguish the book was putting me through. in sophomore year, I made it halfway through before I had to put the book down (more like toss it out the window) only to have it assigned in my senior year of high school. Only the onset of Mononucleosis could save me from completing the atrocity.

Now It is not my intention to bash books you may have enjoyed. Just because I didn’t enjoy books, doesn’t mean you won’t or shouldn’t. Everyone has different tastes. In fact, one of my friends says that Lord of the Flies is one of their favorite books. Just because you love reading one book doesn’t mean you love reading every kind of book. There are very few people in the world who enjoy any book they pick up. I know people who only like reading news stories. My Dad’s favorite books are non-fiction and how-to books about business and leadership (Which I couldn’t understand in a million years). My mother loves to read biographies and non-fiction. I even have a cousin who, honest-to-goodness, loves reading textbooks. I know, I thought she was crazy too. But the point is, everyone is different and everyone enjoys reading different things. I can sit down and read a 600-page book about a magic-wielding-assassin fighting for her life in a single day. But if you ask me to read a 100-page snooze fest (I am so sorry Ernest Hemingway) about a guy fishing (I am not even fishing! I am reading about fishing!) it will take me . . . how long did that take? A month? A month and a half?

When people tell me they hate reading, I completely get it. I hated reading too. But I believe whole heartedly that no one “hates” reading. They just haven’t found the right book yet.

Books are stories written down for people to read. Humanity is surrounded by stories. For thousands of years, humans have passed stories down from generation to generation. Today, stories surround us in the movies we see in theaters, the shows we watch on Netflix, the SnapChat stories we follow, the snapshots of our lives stories on Instagram, the dreams we have at night, or even the stories we hear on the news.

No one hates stories. No matter who you are or where you are from, stories are the lifeblood of humanity. Stories are what inspire us and what teach us about the world. Stories are the foundation of culture. Reading is watching those stories come to life inside your mind. Reading is one way to enjoy a good story.

But reading is miserable if a person does not enjoy it. Just because I hate watching romantic comedies, it doesn’t mean I hate movies. it means I don’t like that kind of movie. Just because someone didn’t enjoy reading fiction about the American Civil war, or about the roaring twenties in The Great Gatsby, doesn’t mean that they won’t enjoy books about kids going to a wizarding school or about a dystopian society.

The American School System values a certain kind of book, namely non-fiction or fiction books. They value the classics like Old Yeller or Shakespeare. There is a belief woven into the fabric of American society that the only “real” books that children “learn from” are in this category. But I can tell you from personal experience that I have learned WAY more about the world and about people from Percy Jackson and the Olympians than from The Old Man and the Sea. In Percy Jackson, a book about Greek Myths in the modern age, I learned what it means to be a leader and how overwhelming it is to take on that responsibility. I learned that people are inherently selfish, but there are some incredible people out there who risk everything to be a good person. I learned that just because someone is in authority above you doesn’t mean they are always right. I learned that people who do bad things don’t necessarily mean to hurt others. I could go on listing forever for the Percy Jackson books. On the flipside, after reading The Old Man and the Sea I learned . . . some fish are hard to catch?

Again, it is important to realize that people enjoy different things. Maybe a person read the Percy Jackson books and just thought it was just a fun story, while The Old Man and the Sea was a dynamic read full of intriguing symbolism and passion. Everyone is different. Books are too broad to be examined from only one side.

I hated reading because I only experienced one aspect of these written stories. I thought nonfiction and most fiction stories were boring. But when I discovered books outside these genres, I loved reading. I have a hunch that most people who claim to “hate” reading is disillusioned by the English curriculum in schools that only dishes out fiction and non-fiction books (with the middle of the road fantasy or Sy-Fy book sprinkled in). The only books they have experienced have been boring to them and they have not discovered the book that makes them want to stay up until 3 am reading.

If you do not like reading, first I would like to congratulate you on reading this blog post, that’s impressive and I am honored that you found it interesting enough to read through until the end. I would encourage you to think about the movies, TV shows, video games, or news stories that you enjoy. If you play lots of Call of Duty, you would probably enjoy some Science Fiction combat stories (Books like Ender’s Game and even The Hunger Games). If you watch true crime shows or listen to true crime podcasts, there are TONS of incredible murder mystery thrillers out there (I have not read any of note but here is a link if you want to check some out yourself https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/teen/5-true-crime-yas-we-love/). If you love watching things like Harry Potter or The Pirates of the Caribbean then you can find mountains of fantastic fantasy stories in Young Adult (I love stories like Dark Life, The Girl Who Could Fly, Cinder, The Throne of Glass, and The Infernal Devices). If you prefer things like La La Land or Gilmore Girls, there is something for you too (I loved Confessions of a First Daughter and Flipped). If you love sports, then you could pick up a non-fiction or historical fiction about your favorite players or some of the greats (Sports is not my area of expertise so here is a link to some good ones https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/sports-fiction). I recommend checking out books in the Young Adult section because these books are usually faster paced and shorter (Top young adult books https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/young-adult). You can find any of these books in your local bookstore, library, or online.

Thank you so much for reading about my journey as a reader. Make sure to come back to ElizabethLux.com to see future blog posts about topics like this. I will be examining different aspects of school curriculum, the myth of fantasy books not being educational, and other topics I covered in this blog post in more depth in the future.

-Elizabeth Lux

Elizabeth Lux is a writer, artist, blogger, and soon to be young adult author.

Elizabeth Lux

Why I Hated Reading

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