A Thousand Lives

I can remember sitting in my small kindergarten class and learning my letters with a boy named Noah as my desk mate. I can also remember moving to Brazil and my mother became my teacher. There were many little stories I learned to read from. One talked about figs and one was an analogy for the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side.” My first major reading project was when a couple visited us from America. She gave me a challenge: read all the Boxcar Children books that I owned before she left. I failed miserably. Being only 8-years-old, reading wasn’t yet my strong suit. But then something amazing happened.

My friends were reading a book series called the Dragon Keeper Series by Donita K Paul and I wanted to fit in so I picked up the first book, DragonSpell, and started to read. Before I knew it, I was captivated; I couldn’t put the book down. In one afternoon, I devoured that 352-page novel. I was 9-years-old. I finished the five book series with the same passion and no one, my friends nor my family, believed I’d actually done it. Apparently, there is a way to cheat at reading. My brothers used to quiz me, hoping I’d mess up and reveal that I was lying about my newfound superhero abilities. I remember my brother made up a new character in the book and pretended it was his favorite character. I wasn’t fooled, though I did start thinking my brother was an idiot. There was no such thing as a boy named Crispin in the books.

After that, I became an avid reader. If anything took me more than a few days to read, I’d consider it a complete bore. My parents had difficulty getting me to sleep at night because I’d stay up at obscene hours just to read my books. If I had to wait for someone to finish a book before I could read it, I would get quite annoyed. I didn’t know anyone else who could read as fast as I could.

Reading is my passion; I love discovering the new worlds behind the pages. Leaping into a story and living it will never cease to make me happy. I loved leaving behind the hot, humid Amazon jungle and going to Hogwarts with Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling) or Bloor’s Academy with Charlie Bone (Midnight with Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo). My favorite quote has often been “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” (Author unknown) Those words have always been true for me. I’ve wandered over Middle Earth with Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien), I’ve fought monsters in New York City with Percy Jackson (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan), I’ve won the Hunger Games with Katniss (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins), and so much more. The world of books turned my boring, everyday life into a glorious adventure. I used to dream of disappearing into those pages and truly, physically leaving this world. I long to explore Erilea with Celaena Sardothion (Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas) or to watch Juliette lead the mutants into a free world (Shatter Me by Taherah Mafi).

Alas, the fiction has always been just that: fiction. Even so, I don’t know how my life would have been without the stories that lifted my spirits every day. It distracted me from my thoughts and, at the same time, filled my head with hundreds of feelings. Who I am today is mostly because of the books I’ve soaked into my soul.

My days are long, drawn-out forms of sunlight from which I cannot escape. With my stories, I am free. I can forget the shackles of reality and soar above the world without even leaving my bedroom, with it’s suffocating four walls. I can lie on my bed and still be riding through roving meadows on a stallion. Without making a sound, I can hear the beating of war drums and the screams of warriors in battle. What is life without adventure, even if your escapade is between the pages of a book?

I will never understand those who live their lives without the joys of reading. How can one choose to live only once when there are thousands of lives just waiting to be lived? Perhaps I am not particularly brave or adventurous, but one can never say I have not lived; for in my books, their pages worn from my love, I have never been more alive.