Growing up, I never could get myself to read, but I’d always try. I’d sit it in the corner couch of my living room and open whichever chapter book I grabbed from my elementary school classroom library for our required reading logs. I’d open it up. I’d read the dedication and I’d read the table of contents. Unwilling to actually start reading, I’d focus on the extra title page and the publication date in an attempt to further procrastinate the dreaded destination of page one. Maybe I should get a snack, that might help me concentrate. I’d put my book down, getting up to ask my mother for some Goldfish or Cheez-its or whatever salty snack I was fixating upon at the time. She’d offer fruits and I’d waste another 15 minutes arguing with her. After winning our battle, I’d sit back down with my Goldfish and open my book. I’d start reading, zone out, re-read, zone out again, creating this indefinite cycle of never moving forward. Then I’d give myself a five minute break which became 15 minutes turning to 20, continuing this until it became dinner time. This summed up my relationship with books from preschool when I first learned to read, all the way until my senior year of highschool.
It was the summer before senior year. It was also the first time I had visited India and seen any of my family in 7 years. So while I had every reason to ignore the copious amounts of summer reading I had in order to spend time with my family, I still decided to read it. Perhaps it was to pass time, since the India visit was so different from when I was a child—where I spent every second with all my cousins and aunts and grandmother, instead of sitting idle on the bed like I was this summer since all my cousins had gotten married and moved away, one even having a child of her own. Or perhaps it was because my mother would keep repeating all the work I had to do in front of my aunt and grandmother, enough until they would start reminding me, and it felt rude not to listen to them. Or maybe, it was simply because of what the books were about.
There were four books I had to read. I personally didn’t find the first one that interesting to me, so I only read a chapter. I have zero recollection of what the second book was about or called or even what it looked like, so I can only assume that I didn’t read this one either. But the third was about India. More specifically, poverty in India. The book was called “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” I read this book, from front to back. I had never seen many books that focused on South Asians. Yes, the book was about poverty in India and painted the place as unclean and undesirable, but it was still the first ever book I had read with a brown person on the cover. And the subject made me want to read more. I had never read books before about current world issues I cared about. Instead our schools made us read the classics that I just couldn’t follow along with: Shakespeare and Homer and F Scott Fitzgerald. This list was long and dull, at least to me. This is what I thought reading was. Boring books and stories about people so different from me and about things so distant from my life. The fourth summer book, “Enrique’s Journey,” was for my Spanish class. It was somewhat similar. It focused on poverty and people trying to escape it, but it had a different setting and purpose. It was about a young boy and his desperate attempts to cross the border into the U.S. to reunite with his mother. As I followed him through his journey to the other side, I learned a much deeper perspective about the lives of so many people trying to reach the U.S. It gave me more empathy for the people and an understanding of how treacherous these journeys are.
Both these books taught me something important going on in real life. It opened my eyes to what is currently going on in the world, something the books I had been forced into reading before didn’t. And so I read these books, start to finish. And then I read them again, and again. These two books fueled my love for reading. It pushed me into a spiral of spending my time at the public library searching for books with representation about people like me or people who look like me. It pushed me into looking up books to teach me more about what’s going on in the world, and about issues I deeply care about. And now after all this searching, and after all those faked elementary school reading logs, I can sit down at my desk or on my bed or my mud stained picnic blanket that I used almost every day this summer in Ann Arbor, and willingly read.