Books are boring.
That’s the mindset I’ve had for about the past 6 years of my life. I still remember the last time I read a book that wasn’t for English class. It was a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Big Shot to be exact. That book series (and maybe Dog Man) was realistically the only time in my life I’ve ever enjoyed reading. Not because the stories had much depth, but because they were funny and relatable.
Now that I’ve grown past my preteen years, I’ve inevitably gotten a lot more conscious of my health and well being. Unfortunately, reading just so happens to be incredibly good for you, so I thought I might as well start now and pick up a book. The problem is, where should I even start?
That was a trickier issue than I expected. I asked my only reading friend, Jack, for a book recommendation. He tells me that all the books he’s read are boring and probably wouldn’t interest me, but still gives me a couple titles. Us Conductors was one of them, which really didn’t seem interesting to me when I looked it up. The other titles didn’t seem very intriguing either, so maybe he was right about me not liking them.
This led me to my second option of just finding books people recommend on Reddit. This is where I’d always go for a human answer when I didn’t want to read the AI overview at the top of the search results. Unsurprisingly, I was suddenly drowning in book recommendations on the appropriately named r/booksuggestions subreddit. I really didn’t want to look up every suggestion to see if it’d interest me or not, so I more or less grabbed the first title I saw and went with it.
That’s how I chose Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck as the first book I’ll be reading. It’s not a long novel by any means—just about 110 pages—but I’m really not trying to overwhelm myself here. I’ll turn to reading longer titles once I finish this one. It’s also meant to be an extremely emotional book, which I do enjoy in media, but I guess there’s no way to know until I get my hands on it.