Books mean different things for different people. At one time or another, most of us have been given assigned reading for school and that means some of us only see reading as homework. Others, like myself, choose to live in two worlds. We use books as an escape from the real world into a more magical, sometimes widely unrealistic one. We are also the ones who thrived in English classes, who poured over hours of required reading and enjoyed it. However, most people don’t feel that way.

My first experience with reading was in elementary school, when teachers would read aloud to the class for half an hour in between classes. While some kids sat in the back to whisper among themselves, I sat at the very front, clinging on to every word. Even if you were not one of the kids listening, you still loved that little bit of time when we were studying and just listening to a story. However, this changes in High School. All the sudden, reading becomes studying and no one reads aloud to you anymore. Books go from adventurous and colourful picture books to “meaningful” literary work. Seeing the “classics” listed on reading lists became daunting and turned most of us away from books.

There are many reasons why these books never appealed to high school students and why I don’t think it ever will. Classics are relatable to students. Most of the time they have very basic plots that tend to bore students who don’t have a natural affinity for reading. The language is also very difficult. I remember sitting in class reading Shakespeare for the first time and looking around the room I could tell no one had a clue what was being said. Since we could not relate to the stories, we also had no interest in interpreting them and often when we did, it was underwhelming. Most of my friends have told me that the last time they read a book was in school and since then they have had no interest in ever picking up a book again. Even though I also enjoyed the stories and trying to interpret them the best I could, I could understand the pain everyone felt when we were forced to finish reading half the book before the next class.

I started to understand this more in college when I was expected to read Jane Austin for the first time. As an avid reader, you’re always told the books that everyone should read and that you’re not a real reader if you don’t know the classics. It is safe to say I did not care for Austin’s writing, as controversial as that is to say. I finally felt the pain my classmates had felt reading Shakespeare, Of Mice and Men and Tom Sawyer. Every paragraph felt like it took a hour to read and I would often find myself re-reading large chunks of text and still not being able to understand. It was the first time in my life as a student that I turned to summary notes online to write my papers.

Reading is an acquired taste. Not everyone can pick up book after book and genuinely enjoy themselves and the story and forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to be doing often ruins the experience. I think required reading ruined reading for a lot of people and traumatized them away from doing it again. Just like anything else we do for enjoyment, it has to be enjoyable. Just like forcing a writer to write about things they have no interest in or a musician to write music in a genre they hate, won’t get great results. It would have made a huge difference in our experience to have been able to choose what we wanted to read, however most books assigned to us were books that appealed to the teachers. Even in college, when I wasn’t being forced to read classics, I was assigned to read some of my professors’ favourite books which most of the time, held no meaning for me other than receiving a decent grade.

It’s a shame that reading became more of a chore for a lot of people, as it should hold the same value for us as music or movies. School ruins people’s desire to read, imagine if school had stripped away our love for music?