A Lifetime of Books

A personal essay by Jaanu

I am incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by reading material. Even before I was fully sentient, my mom was reading to me and telling me stories.

There are many photos of me reading as a small child. These begin with pictures of an infant me holding those building-block books upside down. (Quick aside: does everyone know what I mean by building-block books? The tiny books with about 5 very thick pages? They are so small and squat that they’re block shaped. Small children often use these small sets of books to build towers by stacking one book on top of the other. I think they’re popular because they can give parents some variety – when the child/parent gets bored of stacking a tower, they can be read to/read the small books. Just wanted to be certain that is all clear?)

After I learned to read, I basically didn’t stop for the next ten years. There’s a famous video in my family where my brother is telling a wild story about the moon and a “war-bus” and I’m just chilling in the background reading a book. I remember being captivated by the “Rainbow Magic” series about some fairies, and by the Geronimo Stilton/Thea Stilton series. I went through Junie B. Jones, Magic Treehouse, and American Girl phases. I think, looking back, that this love of books that my mom instilled was such a transformative and tremendous gift. A love of reading and writing passed to my brother and myself from our grandfather, we think. He was a remarkable political journalist and person. Loving stories and books taught me to read well and quickly pretty early on. I used to devour books. I still can’t resist speeding through a good book, but when I was younger, my parents actually used to worry that I read too much. “Always storybooks!” I remember occasional scolds. “You’re reading storybooks all the time, why not something else?”

Loving books and stories also honed my memory as a child, I think. I started liking school because there were even more books and stories there. Reading books, even the weird, quirky children’s serials like “Rainbow Magic Fairies”, sparked my imagination. Navin and I entertained ourselves by building tremendous, elaborate imaginary worlds. Reading made us think about new ideas. We started Spirit probably after reading some book about a newspaper or a journalist.

Books introduced me to the magic of words and language. We tackled spelling bees with gusto because we knew words from reading storybooks day in and day out. Today, books serve a different purpose. I’m reading more nonfiction, and it inspires me to tackle my classes because I’m reminded of real-life applications of what we learn in college. Books can communicate science from the labs to our communities at large. Reading for school breaks up the monotony of problem sets. I didn’t realize then, as a child, how much liking books would shape my life. “We can lose ourselves in books but find ourselves in them too.”

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