Yearning to Read

Patience can be somebody else’s virtue. I don’t want it. I have never wanted the horrible thing; it is as an excuse for wasted time. My impatience has served me well. It led me to fall in love with words, with the intricacies of language. If I had been the thumb-twiddling, wait-for-the-grass-to-grow type, I might never have learned to read.

My earliest memory of reading hardly counts. I remember small details, such as the short red sofa in the back of my preschool classroom, and the funny haircut of the Asian boy who shared books with me. We could only recognize words by sight, ones we’d learned by rote memorization and not by sound. Lacking the tolerance to alphabet-tracing, I had stayed loyal to illustrated books. The words were nonessential; I could think up my own version of the plot. Surely the stories in my head were just as good.

But the Fates had spun my thread, and events were ready to occur. In 1990, a woman boarded a train in Manchester. Before she reached London, J.K. Rowling would conceive her ingenious fantasy: Harry Potter. In doing so, she would show me how wonderful other people’s stories could be. Nine years later, I was in Kindergarten, and my father carried home Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The novel’s thickness was intimidating. The boy on the cover looked silly. His aunt and uncle were mean. Despite my initial protests, my dad read to me each night, and filled my head with wizards, wands and magic spells. I found this was a fantasy to which my own stories could never compare, and I wanted to be a part of it. (Imagine my disappointment when I asked if I could attend Hogwarts and was told owls didn’t deliver trans-Atlantic.) I wanted more. I wanted it now.

So in school, I would join my classmates in the mandatory mundane. It was like I had to learn the password before being granted entry to Harry’s world. I would trace letters and recite sounds. I would come home, wait ages for six o’clock, and then beg my dad to read another chapter, another paragraph, another sentence. The incessant begging, the whining and griping, became a daily routine. Until February, when the cold rattled everybody’s breath and my parents announced their divorce. Now more than ever, all I wanted to do was read Harry Potter. All I wanted was a broomstick to whisk me away.

I had fewer and fewer chances to read with my dad. Pure impatience, wanting to know what Harry did next, forced me to pick up the beautiful book on my own. It was excruciating to stare at the big words and have their meaning stay on the page. I gave up, slammed the cover, threw it aside, then picked it up again. Each tentative time, I spotted more words. I would wrestle with complicated terms. I would ask my teachers about pronunciation and meaning. I would sound out the words, like a good girl, like I was meant to do in class. And as the world turned, I learned to read.

Suddenly it was an addiction; I surrounded myself with letters. I remember once writing all the words I knew in a notebook, and being pleased when it filled a dozen pages. I nagged my mother until she took me to the public library so I could get my own library card. I quickly signed my name in the gray bar, and then checked out heavy stacks of books to carry under my chin. Like a hungry animal, I devoured everything in the house, even the naughty books on my mother’s shelf. I could never wait to get my paws on another story.

Impatience is like that. Impossible to restrain, it resembles a wild dog. But people need to see it like I do, as a blessing. Like a wild dog, impatience catches a scent and will not rest until the prey is captured. My impatience caught literature's magic in its jaws and refused to let go until it was in my control. The unstoppable urge to read, and thus reach that elusive land of fictions, is a blessing. Patience for comprehension is a bag of stones that only holds back. Literacy need passion. Passion, eagerness, motivation: it can all derive from impatience.

I still loved spending time with my dad. Even when it was obvious I was independently capable, my dad read Harry Potter to me at night. It was the last chapter of the fourth installment, The Goblet of Fire, when I dug up the courage to break tradition. Adopting his tone, I read to him, through to the last line. “As Hagrid had said, what would come, would come… and he would have to meet it when it did.”

They say good things come to those who wait, and maybe that’s true for other people. But here’s my argument: if I had been patient, I would perceive reading as a chore. I might still be telling characters in picture books what their roles are in their own tale. My craving for stories, and impatience to have them, led me to seek other worlds and develop a passion for language. At the very least, reading will fill the time while I continue to wait impatiently for my letter to Hogwarts.