I heard somewhere that everyone’s a reader. They just haven’t found their genre yet. And that has stuck with me for a long time because it’s true. Honestly, the people who keep saying they’re not readers either haven’t found their genre yet or they haven’t attempted “reading” in different ways. My wife is really into listening to books on CD, and she’ll listen to them on her commute to and from work. She gets through “reading” books at a pretty fast clip in this way.
One of my friends is big into manga, and she reads each issue as if it’s going out of style. I picked up a manga once and I couldn’t follow what was going on. I’m not that visual, and those books are just as much about what’s going on in the pictures as they are about the words. Maybe even more so. Still other people I know only read non-fiction. Give them the latest biography and they’re set, but try to have them read a Janet Evanovich book and it might as well be in Greek.
Still others I know are the opposite and just like non-fiction. A Facebook friend of mine reads only romances to the exclusion of everything else, and another guy I know is really into just trade books that show him how to do things. My sister is a big fan of books that explain statistics and history in new and fresh ways. Yet another reader I know is into magazines, and she will read them from cover to cover. No books for her.
Me, I’ll read just about anything, so long as it’s well-written. But there are so many people out there who call themselves non-readers, which would be fine if that were true. It’s generally not. Perhaps they don’t count the things they read as reading material. Or maybe they don’t read that often, but the reading that they do counts. And it helps them, even if they don’t realize it. The key is to figure out what interests them and go with it.
I know someone who reads liner notes to albums and analyzes them. Another person I know enjoys reading instructions to games and breaking them down for others who might want to play. Hey, even reading the backs of books to get an understanding of what they might be about, or reading reviews, or reading blogs counts! I have a blogger friend who never read anything in her life until discovering WordPress, and now she religiously spends hours every day reading and responding to blog entries.
It’s fun to watch someone discover their niche, too, to see the light in their eyes when something they read just clicks with them, the excitement and exuberance they get that they can’t keep inside. Even if it’s the most boring thing in the world to me, just the internal satisfaction they embody gets me all excited too. Because everyone’s a reader. Some just haven’t found their genre yet.
We Read Alone 