Reading for Personal Development
I loved reading as a child. I grew up reading, surrounded by books, living in their worlds, daydreaming about being a part of the stories I read. As I grew up, life took over and reading fell by the wayside for many years. Recently, I decided to start reading again, looking for new worlds to explore and daydream about.
As an adult, I am hyperaware of how I spend my time. Some have told me that I shouldn’t waste time reading when I could be doing something more productive. However, I’m a firm believer that you never waste time if you’re doing something you enjoy.
It’s a hard habit to break though, that feeling of wasting time, so I’ve had some reading slumps during my rediscovered love of reading. In fact, as of this writing, I’m currently in a slump. It’s also hard to trust myself to pick books I will love versus picking books that are popular and I feel that I should love.
This also ties back to trusting my own instincts and allowing them to lead me to the books that I can inhabit, like I did as a child, instead of reading rows and rows of meh at best books. My time is indeed precious, as is yours, and I should do my best to read what I enjoy and what makes me happy, other opinions be damned.
Generally speaking, I prefer fiction over non-fiction. As a kid, I only read fiction. I have branched out more as I’ve grown up, but my first love is still fiction. As with other things, I believe in balance. There is value in both, regardless of personal feelings or draw to one over the other, so I would recommend both in your reading repertoire.
Fiction is a way to travel the world, and to other worlds. It’s a way to explore different personalities and perspectives and to discover your own position on a multitude of points and in a multitude of possibilities. All of this helps you grow as a person. It lets you experience what you may not be able to in real life.
Navigating difficult topics, learning responsibilities, and how to respond to different situations are all essential components of being a good human being. Reading can enhance empathy and emotional intelligence via various vicarious experiences and via diverse perspectives. It can also stimulate your own creativity and imagination, which you can then bring into your own life, whether via art or simply via becoming a better version of yourself.
Fiction is also a way to learn more about human behavior, as well as societal norms that may be different from yours, or ones from the past. It can help you learn what life used to be like for people in various parts of the world. It can enhance your own knowledge of human society as well as imagined societies, such as utopian and dystopian ones. You can see how things may play out in various scenarios.
There are two books for me that come to mind that allowed me to completely get lost recently. One I read in one sitting and after completing it, I felt an empty void, which to me is a sign I read a good book. The void, for me, is there because I became so engrossed in the world of the book and once I’m done reading, that world is now gone. The other I read over a couple of days in December, and I couldn’t wait to get home and read more of it and I didn’t want to stop when I had to.
The book that I read in one sitting was House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson. It’s about Marion, who decides to serve as a bloodmaid to Countess Lisavet. As Marion navigates her new life, she learns sinister secrets, what it means to be a bloodmaid, and what price she might have to pay for the luxuries she has received.
It’s a dark gothic story, which drew me in, along with the vampire angle. I am always into vampire stories. It delves into class exploitation (Marion is poor and chooses to be a bloodmaid to attain a different life), ambition, and desperation and how that can lead someone to make a dangerous choice, and the possible moral compromises involved.
It also has themes of power and control, between Countess Lisavet and Marion but also between Marion and the court and Marion and the other bloodmaids, as well as themes of loyalty and betrayal. I would definitely recommend it if any of those components sound interesting to you. I also recently got her newest book, An Academy For Liars, but I’ve yet to read it as of this writing.
The other book was Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Gerber. I think it was the right time, the right place sort of a read. It was cold outside, December, and there was just something so perfectly perfect about the fairytale-esque read that this book was at this time.
It’s about Evangeline Fox and her quest for love, starting with a stone curse and a bargain with Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, and the ensuing journey to fix what was broken. It’s about making desperate choices and the resulting consequences, about trying to fix them, and about learning whether something is worth fixing.
It’s about self-discovery and resilience, about something not falling neatly into the categories of good or evil, or complete truth or complete lie. It’s about balance and finding your own path, taking responsibility for your own actions.
I own both the sequels, but I haven’t read them yet. I heard the 2nd book has a cliffhanger, so I was going to read both that one and the final book together, but I also want to try to recapture the magic so I’m planning on reading them back-to-back this winter. Hopefully I can recapture some of that reading magic again.
Reading for pleasure and reading for knowledge each have their own benefit, and they do work together to allow you to grow and become a better version of yourself. Anyone who belittles your love of reading is a person that lacks the knowledge and fortitude to explore their own deep selves, being content with only knowing their own surface. Do not be that person.
If physical reading isn’t for you, try an audiobook. There are different ways to get to the same destination and there’s nothing wrong with that. Reading can help with stress, it can help you decompress, and it can serve as an escape. Like anything else, there is a balance, and there is time spent to find out what type of books you like and then reading them.
Non-fiction books can help you learn about real world events, history, specific figures, or they can also be about personal development and growth with encouragement on how to achieve and incorporate them into your day-to-day life. I think it’s important to balance both fiction and non-fiction so that you can get the best of both worlds.
One book I read recently was Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s about building good habits and breaking bad ones through small, incremental changes with actual instructions and options of how to do that. It also ties habits into identity, talking about how what we do is who we are and if that’s not who we want to be then we need to break those habits and create habits that support the person that we want to be.
It’s a book that’s easily read through but also one that’s easily referenced and re-read in chunks to implement day-to-day. It’s been a year or two since I read it, and I want to revisit it now that I’m in a different place so that I can take that knowledge and put it into action in my life and actually see the results from it.
Reading, whether fiction or non-fiction, can reduce stress and promote relaxation, help with improved focus and concentration, increase empathy and vocabulary, and enhance communication skills while also improving critical thinking and problem solving.
If reading is new for you, start small. Pick a book you know you loved, even as a kid, and re-read it. Go to the bookstore and pick one that sounds interesting or look up booktuber recommendations. Read a chapter a day. Read for a set amount of time. Dedicate a chunk of time once a week to reading. Experiment with what works for you and find a genre that you like and build from there.
If you already love reading but you’re in a slump, maybe try re-reading a book you know you loved to get you back into the world that made you happy and build from there.
What book are you going to pick up next?
