“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass. […] We’re in the world, not against it. […] The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
Durmstrang Institute is one of the three largest wizarding schools in Europe. Located in the far north of the continent, the school is willing to accept international students from as far afield as Bulgaria. Having existed since at least 1294, Durmstrang is one of the three schools that compete in the Triwizard Tournament, and is notorious for prominently featuring the Dark Arts in its curriculum.
might fuck around and read a 600 page physical published book in one sitting like it’s 2006 and I’m being bullied in middle school so I take refuge in the library and inhale books at a frightening speed that I have not been able to replicate since
I think that so many of us have found that it’s difficult to replicate that same passion for reading, and therefore think we’ve either lost our love of books or lost the ability to enjoy reading, because we’ve forgotten to re-evaluate the types of liturature that we read.
I, like a lot of people, grew up using young adult fantasy as a form of escaping my dire childhood. Everything I read was young adult fiction, and I loved it. I inhaled it, I stayed up all night to read it. So as I got older, I kept going back and back and back to the YA fiction section. And over time I found myself leaving the book closed a little longer, going to sleep instead of reading, forgetting the book places, taking 2 and 3 and 4 times as long to finish it, until eventually I found it difficult to even finish a book, even if I liked the story. I thought I had lost my love of reading and it made me really sad.
Until one day, I picked up a non YA fiction book, and then I picked up another, and another, and another, and another. What I discovered is that I really enjoy non fiction political books, I really enjoy murder mysteries, I really enjoy adult fiction, I really enjoy books on religion and theory. I really enjoy so many things that aren’t YA fiction. As I’ve aged and matured, what I need to feed and preoccupy my mind is different than what I needed as a kid. I no longer need liturature to escape my life, what I need is liturature that stimulates my mind.
I imagine a lot of you are the same. You just haven’t found that new genre of liturature that feeds your mind. And it doesn’t help that we engage in bad habits that make it hard for us to focus. So I have to get into the habit of forcing myself to set some time aside to read, and that’s ok.
If you’re struggling, go find a book you loved as a young adult and reread it, then build off of what you liked about it. Sometimes rereading an old favorite can spark new love in you.
So if you loved reading as a kid and you think you’ve lost the knack for it, I encourage you to branch out and make yourself make some time to read every day.
