Tag: childhood reading

  • When a Book Makes Room for You

    When a Book Makes Room for You

    I had written before about Pawn of Prophecy being the first grown-up book I truly remember finishing.

    I called it grown-up because, to the boy I was then, grown-up meant weight. It meant no pictures waiting kindly on the page to tell me where to look. It meant more than two hundred pages. It meant holding a book in my hands and realizing that the story was not going to bend down to meet me. I would have to rise toward it.

    That book pulled me into fantasy.

    It showed me that reading could be more than an assignment, more than an obligation, more than something adults told children was good for them in the same dry voice they used for vegetables and bedtime. It showed me that a book could be a door. That worlds were waiting behind paper. That some maps were printed in ink, and some were built in the mind.

    But years later, another book did something different.

    It did not pull me in gently.

    It made me work.

    The author was Isaac Asimov.

    The book was Foundation.

    I had read his work before. I had read I, Robot. I knew, at least a little, the clean machinery of his imagination. I knew he could take a question and dress it in steel, logic, and circuitry until it became something larger than a question. But Foundation was different.

    Foundation did not feel like a story at first.

    It felt like being dropped into a room where every adult was already deep in conversation.

    Empire. Decay. Mathematics. Religion. Trade. Politics. Psychology. Civilization. Collapse.

    These were not the words of childhood.

    Not really.

    They were the words of men in quiet rooms deciding the shape of history. Words spoken over maps. Words carried inside institutions. Words sharpened by people who understood that power does not always arrive with a raised fist. Sometimes power arrives as a theory. Sometimes as a doctrine. Sometimes as a prediction. Sometimes, as a sentence, it is so cold and precise that it seems to have no human being behind it at all.

    I remember reading it and feeling the pressure.

    The book gave me a headache.

    Not in the way a bad book gives you a headache. Not from boredom. Not from confusion alone. It was the headache of being stretched too thin. The ache that comes when the mind is trying to grow faster than comfort allows. The ache of climbing stairs two at a time because something above you is calling, and pride will not let you turn around.

    So I kept a dictionary nearby.

    That detail matters to me now.

    A dictionary beside a child reading science fiction is a small altar to hunger.

    It says: I do not understand yet, but I want to.

    It says: I will not let this word turn me away.

    It says: there is something in here worth reaching for.

    I would come across a word I did not know, and the sentence would stop. The whole machinery of the book would halt in front of me. I could have skipped over it. Children do that. Adults do it too. We learn to walk around what we do not understand and pretend the gap did not matter.

    But I wanted to understand what I had gotten myself into.

    That is the phrase that stays with me.

    What had I gotten myself into?

    Not just a book.

    A different kind of thinking.

    With fantasy, I had entered a world of quests, prophecies, chosen people, ancient evils, and hidden destinies. That world had its own difficulty, its own language, its own inheritance. But Foundation asked something else of me. It did not ask me to believe in magic. It asked me to consider history as a force. It asked me to imagine that civilizations could be studied the way storms are studied. That human beings, in great masses, might move with patterns they could not see from inside their own lives.

    That is a heavy thing for a child to hold.

    Because children already live inside systems they cannot name.

    Family systems. School systems. Neighborhood systems. Money systems. Race systems. Silence systems. The strange laws of who gets listened to and who gets dismissed. Who is allowed to be brilliant and who is merely told to behave? Who gets called gifted? Who gets called difficult? Who is encouraged to dream, and who is warned early about the cost of dreaming too loudly.

    A child may not know the vocabulary.

    But he knows the feeling.

    Maybe that was why Foundation troubled me so much.

    The words were difficult, yes. But beneath the words was something I recognized before I could explain it. The book understood that people are not only people. They are also citizens, believers, workers, rulers, servants, merchants, cowards, visionaries, tools, threats, memories, and ghosts inside the body of history.

    It understood that a person could be swallowed by a time.

    And maybe some part of me already feared that.

    Maybe some part of me knew that being lost was not always a matter of direction. Sometimes you are lost because the world around you has already decided where you belong, and you have not yet learned the language to argue back.

    So I learned words.

    Not all at once.

    Slowly.

    One page at a time.

    I looked them up. I went back to the sentence. I read it again. Sometimes I understood. Sometimes I only understood enough to keep going. But enough is not nothing. Enough is how many of us survive the beginning of anything.

    And then, something changed.

    The book got easier.

    Or maybe I did.

    That is one of the quiet miracles of reading. You enter a book as one person and, if the book does its work and you do yours, you leave as someone slightly altered. Not healed. Not completed. But changed in some small interior way.

    At first, the world of Foundation felt like a locked room.

    Then the words began to open.

    The unfamiliar became familiar. The machinery of empire began to hum in a language I could follow. The names no longer felt distant. The ideas no longer stood over me. I started to move inside the book instead of standing outside it, knocking.

    And once I could understand the words, I began to feel something I did not expect.

    I felt welcomed.

    That sounds strange, maybe.

    A book about the fall of a Galactic Empire is not warm in the usual sense. It is not a grandmother’s kitchen. It is not a pot on the stove with steam rising and somebody telling you to sit down before your plate gets cold. It is not soft light, clean linen, or a hand on the shoulder.

    And yet I felt welcomed.

    Not because the book made itself easy.

    Because it allowed me in after I did the work.

    There is a particular dignity in that.

    Some doors open because somebody loves you enough to unlock them.

    Some doors open because you learn how the lock works.

    Both matter.

    I think about that boy with the dictionary now, and I feel tenderness for him. I see him sitting there, probably more stubborn than confident, refusing to let the book defeat him. I see him reaching for meaning. I see him being humbled and strengthened at the same time.

    He did not know then that he was doing more than reading.

    He was training.

    Training his patience.

    Training his attention.

    Training his ability to sit with difficulty without mistaking difficulty for rejection.

    That is not a small lesson.

    Too many people are taught that if something is hard, it must not be for them. They meet a closed door and assume the house was never meant to hold them. They meet a word they do not know and hear the old voices rise up: this is not your place, this is not your level, this is not your world.

    But sometimes difficulty is not a warning.

    Sometimes it is an invitation with teeth.

    Sometimes the book is not saying ‘ leave.‘

    Sometimes it says, “Come closer.“

    Bring your dictionary.

    Bring your confusion.

    Bring your headache.

    Bring the part of you that is tired of standing outside rooms where meaning is being made.

    Come closer anyway.

    I have spent much of my life trying to understand that difference. The difference between a thing that excludes you and a thing that challenges you. The difference between a gate built to keep you out and a mountain that asks whether you are willing to climb.

    As a child, I did not have those words.

    I only had the book.

    I only had the dictionary.

    I only had the ache behind my eyes and the strange hunger that kept me turning pages.

    But I know now that something important happened there.

    A boy who had once learned that fantasy could be fun began to learn that reading could also be demanding, serious, even disciplinary. Not punishment. Discipline. The kind that teaches you to stay. The kind that asks you to become worthy of your own curiosity.

    And that, maybe, is one of the hidden gifts of difficult books.

    They do not simply give us stories.

    They give us evidence.

    Evidence that we can grow.

    Evidence that confusion is not the end.

    Evidence that language, no matter how intimidating, can be approached. Studied. Broken open. Claimed.

    There is power in learning a word.

    There is power in refusing to be embarrassed by not knowing.

    There is power in saying, quietly, even as a child: I am going to understand this.

    That kind of hunger becomes part of you.

    It follows you into adulthood.

    It follows you into the books you later write, the essays you later shape, the memories you later return to with older hands and a more wounded heart. It follows you into all the rooms where you still sometimes feel like you do not belong. It reminds you that belonging is not always given at the beginning.

    Sometimes, belonging is built.

    Page by page.

    Word by word.

    Looked up.

    Read again.

    Carried forward.

    I think that is why Foundation stayed with me. Not only because of its ideas, though the ideas were enormous. Not only because of its scope, though the scope was vast. It stayed with me because it made me participate in my own becoming.

    It did not entertain me passively.

    It required me.

    And there is a strange love in being required by something worthy.

    A book that is too easy may comfort you. There is nothing wrong with that. We need those books too. We need the ones that meet us when we are tired, when the world has scraped too much from us, when we need to be held instead of tested.

    But some books arrive like a teacher who does not raise his voice.

    They place the work in front of you.

    They trust that you can do it.

    They do not flatter you.

    They do not simplify themselves to spare you discomfort.

    They wait.

    And if you stay long enough, they open.

    That was Foundation for me.

    A headache.

    A dictionary.

    A locked room.

    A world.

    And then, eventually, a welcome.

    I did not know then how much of my life would be shaped by that pattern. How many times I would stand before something difficult and wonder whether it was beyond me. How many times I would have to decide whether to walk away or reach for the dictionary, whatever form the dictionary took.

    A book.

    A memory.

    A conversation.

    A silence.

    A wound.

    A history.

    A self I did not yet understand.

    Maybe all of us carry dictionaries of one kind or another.

    Tools for translating the parts of life that first arrive unreadable.

    We use them to understand grief. Love. Race. Family. Masculinity. Faith. Failure. Hunger. Loneliness. Hope. We use them to name what once only hurt. We use them to walk back into the sentence of our lives and read it again with more mercy.

    That boy reading Foundation did not know he was practicing for all that.

    He just wanted to understand the book.

    But maybe that is how becoming often begins.

    Not with a grand declaration.

    Not with destiny.

    Not with anyone telling you who you are.

    Just a child, alone with a difficult page.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • What’s the first book you ever finished and still remember to this day?

    What’s the first book you ever finished and still remember to this day?

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the first book you ever finished and still remember to this day?
    View all responses

    The first grown-up book I remember finishing was Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.

    I call it grown-up because, to the boy I was then, grown-up did not mean taxes, sorrow, responsibility, or learning how to carry silence in your chest without letting it spill everywhere.

    Grown-up meant no pictures.

    Grown-up meant more than two hundred pages.

    Grown-up meant opening a book and realizing nobody was going to help you with images anymore. The world was not going to be handed to you in color and ink. You had to build it yourself. You had to listen to the words, trust them, and let your own mind do part of the work.

    That was new to me.

    Before that, reading had often come with pictures. Comic books had taught me movement. They had taught me color, conflict, rhythm, and myth. They had taught me that pain could wear a cape, that responsibility could arrive before a person was ready, that the world was always asking somebody to stand up.

    But Pawn of Prophecy did something different.

    It slowed me down.

    It invited me into a world that did not appear all at once. It unfolded. A little here. A little there. A name. A road. A secret. A strange feeling that the ordinary life of one boy might not be ordinary at all.

    That is one of the great promises of fantasy.

    The idea that you may be more than you have been told.

    That the small place you begin is not the full measure of your life.

    That somewhere beyond the familiar road, there may be danger, yes, but also meaning.

    I did not know then that I was being drawn into a tradition. I did not have the language for genre, worldbuilding, archetype, quest, prophecy, or inheritance. I just knew that I wanted to keep going.

    Page after page.

    Chapter after chapter.

    Not because someone made me.

    Because I wanted to know.

    That mattered.

    Many children are taught to read as a duty. As homework. As proof. As something adults measure, grade, and turn into performance. But this book helped me learn that reading could be a pleasure. Reading could be hunger. Reading could be a private door opening inside an ordinary day.

    I read the rest of the series.

    Then I read the second series that came later.

    That is how obsession begins sometimes. Not with thunder. Not with some grand declaration. Just one book that works its way into you and leaves the door open behind it.

    And once that door is open, you become dangerous in the best possible way.

    You become a child who knows there are other worlds.

    You become someone who understands that paper can hold kingdoms.

    You become someone who can sit in a room, turn a page, and be gone.

    Gone, but not lost.

    Elsewhere, but still becoming.

    I think back on that book now not only because of the story itself, but because of what it gave me permission to feel. It told me that long books did not have to be intimidating. That imagination was not childish. That fantasy was not an escape, as people sometimes say, with judgment in their mouths.

    Fantasy was training.

    It was a rehearsal for wonder.

    It was a way of learning that the visible world is not the only world.

    And maybe that is why I remember it so clearly. Because that book did not just lead me into science fiction and fantasy. It taught me that stories could be lived inside. It taught me that a book without pictures could still fill the mind with images. It taught me that reading was not only something you did.

    It was somewhere you went.

    These days, I do not spend as much time reading what other people have created. I have been trying to build my own. Trying to take the lessons those old books left behind and shape them into something that carries my own breath, my own questions, my own ache.

    But I remember where it started.

    With more than two hundred pages and no pictures.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?

    What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?
    View all responses

    Books.

    That is the easy answer.

    The truer answer is escape.

    Not escape in the weak sense. Not running away because I could not face the world. More like finding a door where no one else had thought to put one. A door hidden in paper. A door stitched into panels of color and speech bubbles, into capes and impossible cities, into heroes who were wounded but still stood up when the moment demanded it.

    I started with comic books.

    They were bright, loud, impossible things. Men and women dressed like thunder. World’s ending every few pages. Cities held together by courage, guilt, grief, and the stubborn belief that somebody still had to do the right thing, even when doing the right thing cost them something.

    I did not know it then, but I was studying.

    I was learning pacing.

    I was learning myth.

    I was learning how pain could be given shape without being named too plainly.

    Then came fantasy.

    Kingdoms. Forests. Chosen ones. Old magic buried beneath ordinary soil. A sword pulled from silence. A child discovering that the world was larger, stranger, and more dangerous than anyone had warned them. Fantasy taught me that reality was not always the deepest truth. Sometimes a dragon was not just a dragon. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was inheritance. Sometimes it was the thing waiting at the edge of childhood, breathing smoke.

    Then came science fiction.

    Stars. Machines. Strange planets. Futures built from the anxieties of the present. Science fiction taught me that imagination could ask hard questions without raising its voice. What makes us human? What do we owe one another? What happens when progress outruns wisdom? What happens when we build new worlds and carry the same old wounds into them?

    I read anything I could get my hands on.

    Anything.

    There was hunger in it.

    Not the kind that complains. The kind that searches cabinets when no one is looking. The kind that learns to make a meal out of whatever is available. I consumed stories that way. Greedy, grateful, half-starved for elsewhere.

    And sometimes, when the book was right, when the room was quiet enough, when the world had loosened its grip on me for a little while, I stopped reading.

    I was there.

    I could see it.

    The dust on the road. The flicker of torchlight. The broken starship wall humming in the dark. The hero’s hand trembling before the final choice. The old mentor already knowing the cost. The enemy not entirely wrong. The child standing at the edge of becoming, afraid to step forward and more afraid not to.

    That was the magic.

    Not that books showed me other worlds.

    But that they made me feel as if I had survived them.

    Now I do not read as much about the world’s other people as I used to. Not because I love them less. Maybe because some part of me finally understood what all that reading had been preparing me for.

    I was not only visiting.

    I was apprenticing.

    Every comic book, every fantasy kingdom, every distant planet was placing a tool in my hand. Teaching me how to build. Teaching me how to listen. Teaching me that a world is not made only of maps and names and invented histories.

    A world is made of longing.

    A world is made of rules and wounds.

    A world is made of what people fear, what they worship, what they hide, what they carry, and what they are willing to lose.

    These days, I am trying to create my own.

    Not because I have forgotten the ones that raised me.

    Because I remember them.

    Because I owe them.

    Because somewhere there may be another child sitting in a room too hot in summer, too cold in winter, holding a book like it is a secret passage out of the life they have been handed.

    And maybe one day, if I do this right, they will open something I made.

    And for a little while, they will not simply be reading.

    They will be there.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times