I bought the first book of a translated Japanese manga today, Oishinbo. Its about food, talking mostly about sushi and preparing sashimi. A lot of it goes over my head, but its actually pretty interesting. There is a story line and its interesting to see it evolve slowly, but still focusing on food. There are even a couple recipes in the book on how to prepare sashimi. I don’t think I would ever have the guts to serve raw fish at home. Seems like the perfect way to poison yourself. I’ve only really read 3 of the short stories so far, but I like it.
Growing up, I never really read much manga. I was more into mystery novels and the Babysitter’s Club. I went through a phase of reading books about horses too. In Elementary school, I wasn’t very good at reading or English (they even sent me to ESL and I freaked out). In my grade 6 year, my principal started a reading group and invited a couple of my friends to that group and I wasn’t. Me being the super stubborn individual that I am, was convinced that I needed to be in that group. I worked ridiculously hard and managed to get myself in that group by the end of the school year. It was really then that a huge switch was made in my head. When I was younger, I excelled in math, but now, I feel much more comfortable with words. In Elementary school, I wasn’t a great speller – in fact even now I still have my moments when I can’t remember if a particular word ends with “ance” or “ence”. Usually I have to write it out to double check. The other day I was at work and writing the word “style” a lot. After awhile, I was convinced that I was spelling it wrong cause it just looked jumbled to me (does that happen to you?!)
Anyways back to the topic of reading and books… I find lately, I can’t finish any book I pick up no matter how interesting it is. My room is littered with half read books. Currently I’ve been trying to read Eat, Pray, Love, The Lost Symbol, a couple non-fiction books on online marketing and now this manga. Ever since IB, I haven’t really been able to finish books regularly. With the internet so readily available, it makes it even harder for me to pry myself away. Even if I don’t finish books, I still find myself buying them and getting half way through before losing interesting. What to do?
2 comments:
It's so true, the Internet makes us only read short articles at a time and we are now trained to have much shorter attention spans. I can't even finish reading an Archie comic nowadays...
take a break. wait until you really want to read again and it'll happen :) the first non-school book that i read in ages was a week or so ago when i went to the beach by myself.
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