Baraka_Guru

I grew up in a household where reading wasn't a priority. It was passively encouraged on rare occasions, but it was mostly a case of it not being actively discouraged.

The majority of my reading was done in school. At home, it was mostly television and video games. It was that way until I became a teenager and got into D&D. I read the game materials and read several of the novels (maybe 15 to 20 of them, max.). When I got into high school, I stopped playing D&D and was mostly into video games. I was a slacker from grades 9 to 12, where I only partially read most of the assigned novels. I probably completed reading only a few novels (I'd say 3 at most) during that time.

It was in the OAC (grade 13) year where I started to apply myself. I think I read most of the materials then, but there were still many incomplete reads there as well. It was difficult to shake bad habits. I enjoyed myself though. It was then I realized the the arts were my strength.

However, I went to college to study business/marketing. It was then that I formed better reading habits. I graduated with an A average and was considered among the top of my class. But even then, I would only read school materials. I was still gaming in my spare time.

After college, I was lost regarding my career path, knowing I wasn't really into marketing. So I reflected on the joys of my OAC year and figured studying English was what I wanted. That was when I started reading regularly, mostly capital-L "Literature" and a heck of a lot of it: I ended up taking a specialized English degree, which is basically so many English courses for it to be like a double major (i.e. I crowded out any potential minor).

At that time, I pined over reading on my own for the first time since the D&D novels in my teenage years. However, I didn't have the time. I did read a couple of novels such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and DeLillo's White Noise on my own time, but not much else.

When I finally graduated, I was already working full time at the book publisher I currently work for. By the time I finished college and started at university, I was already well versed in using language in a formal sense, both in writing and editing. I suppose I always had that strength, but I only exercised it during my post-secondary education.

Even today I struggle to read a lot on my own time. Now that I read for a living, it takes discipline to sit down in the evenings and read some more. For example, I've had A Dance with Dragons for a week now, and I'm still on page 9. I try to read the news, but I tend to only scan headlines or the first few paragraphs of interesting articles.

I find myself falling a lot into tl;dr with anything that isn't a novel, which I tend to read in small chunks over a long period. I read maybe a handful of novels a year now (not including work).

I'm a slower-than-average reader and I don't have the best short-term memory. I understand the language and how it fits together, but I don't have a great vocabulary beyond the core essentials of the language.

I found many of the words in this vocabulary test to be too advanced or elaborate to be of any use in most applications (e.g., trade books and consumer magazines, etc.---i.e., for the average reader).

For the past several years, I've been meaning to beef up my reading. There are many books I want to read before I die. There are other books I want to read for fun. (Basically literary vs. genre novels.) However, I find myself gravitating back to the computer to browse the net or play games.

Okay, so that was probably long-winded, but there you have it. I was never a strong reader, and it was only because I earned an English degree that it might appear otherwise.

I think one advantage I have is I'm a quick learner, I can adapt quickly to situations, and I'm good at processing and organizing information. Maybe it's the combination of these things that make me appear far more well read than I actually am.

(From what I've read on the board here, the average TFPer has read far, far more books than I have.)

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot