On Reading

by Kylee Walton

I’ve been doing this since I was a child, reading. I don’t really remember when reading “clicked” for me, I just remember doing it. It’s a strange thing, knowing a skill for as long as you can remember but not remembering when you were actually learning it. It’s something I particularly notice with skills that are more “inherent” like reading, writing, and speaking. A person learns these skills at a rather early age, and memories are already fuzzy from that time, so it seems like a natural outcome to forget the act of learning that inherent skill.

I read all the time in grade school. Most of my spare time was spent reading different YA novels (both for academic and personal reasons) and discussing them with my friends and classmates. I even went as far as hiding specific books between shelves in the classroom so only I could read them. However, throughout middle school and early high school, my relationship with reading was practically nonexistent. In my sophomore year of high school I picked up a book from my town’s local bookstore, Long Way Down by Jason Reyonds, and made a plan to start reading again. I was consistently alone that year of school due to lockdown, so I spent many hours reading. This is when I started developing taste. After reading Dig by A.S King, a surrealist novel following five cousins and their navigation through their family’s dark past, I realized I’d found my niche. Two years later, I read what I’d consider the epitome of my favorite kind of book, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. 

Most people who know me know that I don’t really stop talking about this book (and even have a tattoo inspired by it), but when I first read this book, it changed my life. The book is 500 pages long and a multitude of confusing and convoluted things happen within it. To this day I don’t fully understand the book, and I think I’m due for a re-read soon. 

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle follows a man, Toru, who searches for both his missing cat and wife through a netherworld beneath Tokyo. This book has five plots simultaneously happening in different time periods and it would take a whole dedicated essay to explain the full plot alone, but the way Murakami navigated all of these different surrealist concepts and mixed them with history and the human experience really struck me down. The book totally encapsulated what I wanted to both read and write. 

There’s a relationship there, between humans and human-made art. Writing truly has a soul behind it, despite the debate on what exactly a soul is. The connection between the two is both deep and surface level. I can relate a character’s feelings to myself, but they can never relate to me. There is a deep understanding of the themes in a book, but I will never fully grasp the author’s true intention. I am still unclear if any of these things can change, as I feel that it’s been like this forever. Whenever I pick up a book, I stare at it and think, will this break the seal?

It won’t. I know it won’t, but I’m fine with that.