A world hidden between pages

I love reading. It's something I cannot imagine living without; it's a second nature of mine. When my brother and I were just little kids our mum didn't allow us to stay up past 7 pm. And she forbade us to watch TV after around six. The only thing we still could do was looking at storybooks, later read in real books. When we got older, and I'm talking about the time until I was thirteen, the TV turn off time was eight and we were allowed to read until nine. She was quite strict, you know.

As me and my brother didn't have much against that rule we actually read quite a lot. I remember one of the first books I read was about an alley cat. Title and name are still present to me and I think it was about the first book to actually make me cry.

Well you see my mum was supportive of us reading, but she wasn't supporting of us staying up long due to that. So at a certain age I started to read under my blanket, using a DS game boy as a light... bad decision. My mum once told me that she used to do the same, that's why she has glasses. Second generation here and I'm convinced it was worth it. She also wasn't supportive of certain genres though. Harry Potter was no problem; she even went to see every single movie with my brother and me because she wanted to. What she didn't like were vampire stories, but in the end she let us do what we wanted, she couldn't stop me from reading Twilight anyway.

There is this thing about books; they carry a lot of emotions. On the one hand side there are the ones that are written down. The heartbreak when a main character dies, the pain you life through with a person that does in fact not even live, let alone feel anything. It doesn't help. I can tell myself about a thousand times that I read a story that is purely fictional. I can't keep distance to a story; I fall right into it and get lost. Sometimes I need to remind myself that I don't have to fight an evil magician or that I am not battling a deadly fever or that there is definitely not a giant snow storm going on outside, as it is summer. Yes all of these things happened at some point in my head and I had to get over them.

Another thing is that sometimes I can't help but cry or shout or squeal. I'm not a quiet reader (am not a quiet anything to be honest). This spring I was at a friend’s house for a couple of days as kind of a vacation. She is one of my closest friends and I feel quite at home there, so one day she was learning some songs while I was sat on her couch reading. It happened that the male main character of a book died so tragically that I started to bawl like a baby. She looked up to me, asked what happened and when I told her she got back to her music. Not because she is rude but because she understands that I needed to get the pain out and after that I'd be ok. Today was one of these days too, I've read three entire books in 26 hours, (of which I slept 7 and was away 6 more) and in the end I cried because it was heartbreaking. On the other hand there is barely anything that makes me feel more stress released than finishing a truly beautiful, addicting and somewhat perfect story. That’s somewhat explains why I can't go on for too long without reading, it's just not healthy for me.

The last but not least thing that fascinates me about this whole topic is the knowledge you absorb. I can't even imagine how different I'd be if I had never read all these books. I don't see myself as intelligent, but how duller life would be without people like Elizabeth Bennet, Hermione Granger, Aria Stark, Aischa, Jenny, Peeta, Alice, Theo and so one. How less I'd now about Islam, of Heisenberg uncertainty principle, about Westeros, the time around 1666, shadow man, and the USA? I'd have no idea what I'd be even talking about in this last paragraph. Part of my personality was formed by books, and I hope that this keeps happening until my eyes are too weak to see anything more, and if you ask me that'll be the day when I switch to audio books anyway ;)

Cheerio.