I don’t know if you are part of the book community on Twitter, but if you are not YOU ARE BLESSED. Anyway, I think it was at the beginning of this year that someone was arguing that if you read more than a certain amount of books a year, let’s say 50, ESPECIALLY FICTION, you are wasting your time and you are not learning. Others argued that the people who read 300 books a year (which, from my point of view, everyone who reads 100 or more books a year deserves a trophy because I can’t 😂) were just skimming through the pages. Can I tell you something? I READ FROM 20 TO 60 AND I SKIM THROUGH PAGES NO SHAME! (But maybe I’ll talk about this in another post).

So with that in mind, I wanted to talk about this here but I didn’t know how to, so browsing through WordPress I found this amazing blogger hat writes posts where they mention 30 words they learned from the last books they read, and that is what gave me the base to write this.

First of all, if you want to read for fun, which is what almost every reader does, DO IT! Don’t feel ashamed of enjoying your time and not taking anything from that book, books are not always supposed to teach you something. If you are like me, you may take something new from everything, even a song, and that is AMAZING TOO. For example, I have a friend that always looked at me funny because I tend to say “yeah, but if you pay attention to the song you can see that the singer/writer means this and wants to tell you something more than what is obvious” and to be honest I DON’T KNOW WHY I AM LIKE THAT BUT I LOVE IT!

I am in love with learning, I’m always trying to learn something new even if it is how to write in a different way but I read to escape, to feel something I don’t usually feel, to take a break from the busy life I have, to go away to other worlds even if it is not a fantasy. But many times I read to put myself in someone else’s position, to understand better others, to get another view of what is often talk around the media, AND to escape the media. And that is the reason I’m here today, to tell you that you can learn from every book and every page you read.

Maybe you read a thriller and you tell me “what am I going to learn from here? How to kill someone?!” well… if that is your goal in life… I won’t applaud you but I won’t shame you. But I will argue that you can learn something from the forensics aspects of a murder, or the psychology aspect even. You can learn how to be more alert when you are walking around in your neighborhood, I don’t know! You can learn a lot from someone being followed or something like that.

Maybe you just learn a new joke or saying, if you read a book not centered in the USA you can learn a new recipe or what other cultures believe and “rules” are. You can learn from the history of that place, for example, if you read Your Heart My Sky by Margarita Engle you might learn a thing or two about the times were Cubans didn’t have access to food and were put in jail for taking a fish from the ocean/beach/sea/etc because those WERE PROPERTY OF THE GOVERNMENT! If you read La Charca by Manuel Zeno Gandía you can learn how was Puerto Rico in 1894 and how it has changed, how much the rural zone of this island changed. Or if you read In the Times of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez you might learn about the strong Mirabal sisters and the HORRIBLE Trujillo’s dictatorship. You can learn mythology from Rick Riordan, Madeline Miller, and so many more authors that I can’t think of right now.

And you may want to argue with me that not every book is capable of teaching the reader something, but even a quote is learning, even finding out what you enjoy or don’t enjoy reading, IS LEARNING. You can learn about new places, fantastical or not; you can learn a little bit about yourself or others, for example reading an OwnVoices book about someone in the LGBTQIA+ community or from a BIPOC community. And sometimes while you are reading a book you can learn about another book you haven’t heard before or even a new TV show or music.

I know all this might seem ridiculous and that I was rambling about a topic that is not really important to many, but I think is important to discuss this and say YOU CAN LEARN FROM EVERYTHING, EVEN FROM YOUR PET! And if you read one book a year and IS A FICTION that taught you something. If you read 300 books a year and EVERY SINGLE ONE IS FICTION, you learned from almost every book you read. So don’t pay attention to those who want to blame the readers that focus on fiction or read for relaxation, etc. you do you if you get something new for that book GREAT if you don’t GREAT TOO. Just enjoy your time and turn your back to those trying to make you feel bad.

This is all for today, hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for reading my blog! I can’t wait to talk to you in the comments! Hope you all are having a nice day. Keep reading, keep reacting and making new bonds! Take care, I’ll see you at my next one, Goodbye!

-Yade

Ps. from now on, I’ll try my best to link this post IN EVERY POST I MAKE. Please, be sure to check it out AND share it.

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