May 2017
To tell the truth, I am a huge book nerd. Or so I’ve heard. Ever since I was eight I have been reading Dickens and Alcott and Fitzgerald, Melville and Steinbeck and Bronte.
In the early months of my nines, I could be found in the closet, eyes scrunched hard and every muscle in my body straining. This was after I had read the Narnia series for the first time and tried to reach the Dancing Lawn, wanting to waltz with a prince and play chess with a dame. I would put on a flowy skirt and hobble around in my mom's wedding heels, pretending to be a Victorian lady. My shoulders back and neck held painfully high, I still have never felt more confident. So weightless.
The relationships I made with Holden, my always childish best friend, Moby ****, my pet whale who barely fit in the bathtub, and Jo March, the spiteful young woman who taught me how to write freely, built me to a place I thought unattainable. Occasionally, the words would fly over my head, leaving a slight breeze of understanding to push back my curls, but the confusion was alright with me as long as I could immerse myself in the world that the current characters lived in. And sometimes even these worlds seemed so horrid that I couldn't imagine the lives that would have been lived in them, my largest difficulty being a scraped knee or a paper cut from my latest read. The characters that I had thought of as beautiful and honest were truly insensitive and materialistic (speaking of one particular Amy March).
Although I may be a book nerd, the books that I have read have allowed me to look into the true nature of the people around me, their values and their motives, and the state of the world around me, whether it is lying in shambles or standing amidst the distant stars.
Written works have this odd power, maybe a little too much for such subtle things, where they can touch the edge of what we thought we knew and turn it upside down. And that, in short, is why I love reading so much. So, yes, I am a book nerd and, maybe, so are you.
In the early months of my nines, I could be found in the closet, eyes scrunched hard and every muscle in my body straining. This was after I had read the Narnia series for the first time and tried to reach the Dancing Lawn, wanting to waltz with a prince and play chess with a dame. I would put on a flowy skirt and hobble around in my mom's wedding heels, pretending to be a Victorian lady. My shoulders back and neck held painfully high, I still have never felt more confident. So weightless.
The relationships I made with Holden, my always childish best friend, Moby ****, my pet whale who barely fit in the bathtub, and Jo March, the spiteful young woman who taught me how to write freely, built me to a place I thought unattainable. Occasionally, the words would fly over my head, leaving a slight breeze of understanding to push back my curls, but the confusion was alright with me as long as I could immerse myself in the world that the current characters lived in. And sometimes even these worlds seemed so horrid that I couldn't imagine the lives that would have been lived in them, my largest difficulty being a scraped knee or a paper cut from my latest read. The characters that I had thought of as beautiful and honest were truly insensitive and materialistic (speaking of one particular Amy March).
Although I may be a book nerd, the books that I have read have allowed me to look into the true nature of the people around me, their values and their motives, and the state of the world around me, whether it is lying in shambles or standing amidst the distant stars.
Written works have this odd power, maybe a little too much for such subtle things, where they can touch the edge of what we thought we knew and turn it upside down. And that, in short, is why I love reading so much. So, yes, I am a book nerd and, maybe, so are you.
