Michelle Wright writes about how reading tells her about herself as much as it provides an escape from the humdrum. Go here to find out how you can contribute to the Everybody’s Reading website.
We always have to be switched on these days it seems; dashing about, constantly connected to each other via texts and Tweets. When do we get to just stop and think for a minute? Well, that’s what reading does for me. Books are my invitation to go home, lock the door, and steal away for a bit.
As I flip open the cover of a good novel and begin to read, I forget about my Facebook status and indulge my private sense of self instead. It’s great to come across characters who you can relate to, who speak to you. For shy, socially-awkward girls such as myself, this can be a particular treat. We may hang about quietly on the side lines in ‘real’ life, but we rock centre stage in fiction. I’ve taken comfort and found strength in seeing my experiences reflected in those of Lucy Snowe, the central character in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and those of Rhoda, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
And when I peel back the pages of a non-fiction book, the trivialities and pressures of the rat race soon fade away as I immerse myself in ideas that encourage me to take a different view of the world. When I read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman earlier this year, her feminist critique of society inspired me to think in new ways about the turbulent political and economic times in which we live (not bad for a book that was written in 1792!). Other books of political philosophy and theory have similarly led me to engage with the world in the sort of more meaningful and hopeful way I perhaps would not enjoy if I always chose to switch the television on instead.
Then there’s poetry. Whether it’s the intensity of the Romantics or the more light-hearted verse of contemporary poets such as Sophie Hannah, I like how poetry captures a mood or a moment in clear, musical form. Reading a poem fills me with a sense of tangibility and intimacy that gets harder to grasp in these increasingly digitised and de-personalised times. Poetry also enriches my perceptions of nature and I become better able to appreciate my physical surroundings as a result.
So whilst I often pick up a book as a means of escape, as soon as I burrow down into its pages, my sense of the world and my own place in it opens up. Then when I am ready to snap the cover shut and venture back outside again, it’s with eyes open and mind alert to what’s going on, and with a soul warmed from having come to know myself that little bit better.
That’s what reading does for me.
‘Michelle earns her living as an admin assistant in local government, but writing is her work. She writes creative non-fiction, essays, book reviews and a bit of poetry.
