Sometime around my senior year of high school, I had a realization that I hadn’t read a book for leisure in nearly ten years. As embarrassing as it is to admit in hindsight, at the time I couldn’t have cared any less; I thought the one book I half-read for my English class each semester was enough. But even when I was reading ten years prior, it was infrequent and I missed out on many of the ‘classic’ series (no, I still have never read Harry Potter). My will to read was nonexistent, yet I remember one day during a US History class, my teacher mentioned a book called Killers of the Flower Moon – a real story documenting how a Native American tribe became the richest per capita group in the world after oil was discovered on their reservation. Unrightfully, they were murdered and plundered of their money in many incomprehensible ways. The injustices against the Osage Nation are what led to the creation of the FBI (which ironically enough fed into the corruption for the initial years after its conception). For some reason I will never know, when my teacher briefly mentioned that book during class, I opened a sticky note on my computer and wrote it down.

Many months later, after the stress of college applications had dwindled down, I ended up revisiting that sticky note – I must have hit an unbearable level of boredom because I went to the nearest Barnes and Noble and bought it. This was a milestone – I had just bought my first voluntary book since I was probably learning how to read. You can probably guess where this is going, but if not, I can spell it out for you. The specifics are a bit fuzzy at this point, but I remember sitting on the couch in the room adjacent to my bedroom and reading that entire book in just a few sittings. It was the most engaged I had been reading a book and it was such a page-turner it felt as if I was reading fiction. Since then, I have not forgotten the range of emotions I experienced when I finished that book: regret from all the years of not reading, stimulation from the hours of page turning, and a sense of accomplishment from doing something out of the ordinary. After that day, I pledged to read more and it ended up becoming my New Year’s Resolution for 2020.

As most resolutions go, things started off quite poorly since I was busy adjusting to college and dealing with an unprecedented amount of social and academic weight. But just as I began to forget about my goal, the pandemic hit, and I, along with my 20,000 classmates, were sent back home. Perhaps an overly optimistic way to look at the outbreak, I was thrilled to have so much time to read. In the months following March 2020, I was ordering books at a rate I hadn’t even conceived when setting that goal. There were days when I would wake up, go on a run, and then read an entire book in one sitting (I’m not a very fast reader so this was often a day-long exercise). There were even times when I would go to a bookshop and end up sitting there finishing the exact book I had come to buy. Reading not only became a hobby but also a great source of education about topics not previously in my scope of thought.

Since the pandemic ended and I returned to school, I have had a very on-off relationship with reading. During the semesters, I found myself reading just about never, but then over winter/summer breaks, I would spend hours trying to catch up on all the lost time. But, just a few months ago, I graduated college and moved to New York for work. I now realize that if I want to continue reading, I need to build it into my schedule. It can be difficult to have agency when it feels like there’s so much else to do here, but I’ve been happy with my efforts towards allocating time to read. I started carrying a book with me for my commutes to and from work and now even block out periods in the afternoons/evenings to read whenever I need a break. I still haven’t crossed into the reading-before-bed territory, but I think it’s because by the time I get into bed, I’m too exhausted to want to do anything besides sleep. Aside, I decided one way to encourage me to continue my goal of reading is to review every book I write. So, that’s exactly what I set this page up for. I hope to give an honest review of everything I read, not only to hold myself accountable but also to give myself the ability to reflect on books I’ve read in the past.