Reading (with Closed Captions)

Okay, hear me out...

(Want to hear me read this to you? Just press the play button above.)

Even before the days of BOOK IT! and the choke hold those Pizza Hut personal pan pepperoni pizzas had on me, I loved to read.

And, as a writer, I’ve been told over and over again how important it is to read. Stephen King famously says in his book, On Writing: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

This pronouncement has always given me anxiety, given me pause. It’s made me feel like a fraud, because I just don’t read nearly as ravenously as other writers I know.

Full confession: I am simply not a fast reader.

In fact, I am a very slow reader. The kind of reader that often needs to reread a page again and again (and again) because my mind wanders. The kind that prefers to borrow books from the library, rather than a friend, because the library doesn’t ask me what I thought of it when I return it—thus, discovering I didn’t actually have time to read it all before giving it back.

I have never been someone who can go cover to cover in a weekend. While the phrase, “I just couldn’t put it down,” is something I aspire to truly mean, it’s never been my literal truth, because no matter how good a book is, this gal doesn’t have time to not put it down.

And if I had to make time to finish reading a book before making time to write? Well, let’s just say you’d not be reading any of these words right now.

It had become pretty common for me to look at the literal TBR pile in my living room with guilt instead of excitement. Was I ever going to read these books? I’d so desperately wanted each and every one of them at some point in time. Was I ever going to give them the proper attention they deserved?

The honest answer felt like a no. Until one day…

I was in my feels and wanted someone to just read to me. I’d tried audiobooks in the past, with less-than-stellar results, because my mind, well, it wanders. Plus, my leaning tower of TBR was giving me the judgiest of looks. So I grabbed a book from it, along with my headphones, opened the Libby app, and borrowed the same book.

And I got lost in the words in the best of ways. My eyes on the page as they were narrated was a game changer. I did the unthinkable. I read that book in one weekend! I loved the experience so much, I did it again the next weekend, too.

What was even more exciting to me is that I was reading novels in verse. So, had I only listened to them, I would have missed out on the gorgeous visuals. Like these from Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down.

I mean, COME ON. Seeing the words on the page this way, hearing the author read them to me. This is truly my favorite way to read now.

This may already be a thing, this reading with closed captions, as I like to call it. But it’s brand new to me.

And maybe now, with this new way of reading, I’ll finally finish that Stephen King book. (I’ll take that personal pan pizza now, please.)