BACK TO SCHOOL: No School Reading For Me, No Sir

Today, I am excited to bring you our final guest post in honor of Back to School, courtesy of Rhea at Rhea's Neon Journal Book Blog.  She has taken a little different perspective, and it is one that you do not want to miss.

-------------------------

In case it isn’t clear, I love reading. More than eating, and sleeping, and donuts, and coffee. Definitely more than breathing. And now that I’ve bared one part of my soul to you, here’s the other:

I absolutely loathed reading anything in school. I just couldn’t, you know? I couldn’t put my mind to it and I distinctly remember not ever wanting to even pick stuff up from the school library…Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton. None of this stuck with me and I’ve always hated reading something I’m forced to.

But woah, you guys, hold up. It was a completely different scenario at home, with my mother having made peace with the fact that I would probably never eat food in front of the idiot box. Like, you know, the rest of my family. It would always be Harry Potter, dinner and me. I read and re-read and re-read and read Harry Potter (all six of them) again and again and again though middle school and high school. Then HP and The Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007 and I had to wait until September for it to step into my outstretched arms. And the re-reading process started all over again. 

Of course, teenage girls craved glittery vampires in 2008, and I was bitten by the Edward Cullen bug. I saw the movie, went completely bat shit cray-cray, bought all the books, and sadly, HP was cast aside for awhile. Remember, all this while, I still hated reading school stuff. It irritated me to no end that Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman were being forced on me, when all I wanted to do was run back to the Cullen Clan. Sigh. Horrible times, those.

And then came college. I took up learning Commerce and I got busy. Crazy busy. All books were kept aside and for two years, I managed to read nothing but a few books that were a part of my rather pathetic English curriculum in College. And yet, in the summer of 2014, I found a way to reintroduce books into my life, when I gave a big Fuck You to accounting and book-keeping and took up studying what I really wanted to study—Law.

Law and Literature are helplessly intertwined and thank god for that. Blogging introduced me to the kind of books I would never willingly pick up for myself. Reading NA was never my thing, MG to me was only Harry Potter from years 1 - 4, and YA, what YA? But getting out of school and Junior College was probably the best thing that ever could happen for me, reading-wise. I still hate reading books that I have to, but hey. At least I’ve moved on from the stage where I’d come home, cry to my mother and tell her I had another book to read that wasn’t Harry Potter. *winks*