I am a bookworm… or just a worm…

Would you still love me if I were just a bookworm?

Anyway, I have honestly never liked reading, or rather had the patience for it, even if I was interested in the books I wanted to read. This may be in part due to some undiagnosed ADHD as a child, but who knows. I was born in Romania, so mental illnesses are not real. What is real is getting headaches, toothaches, paralyzed, killed or bacterial and viral infections from… air. Yes, a breeze of air is dangerous, sometimes even in the summer. God forbid there is air circulating because you w i l l die. 

Since I moved to Germany, I sort of started forcing myself to read books because they’re a great way to improve your vocabulary. At first I started by forcing myself to read 10 pages a day. Using page numbers as a goal instead of timers meant that I could try to read those pages whenever and for however long I wanted to. If instead I had said “I am going to read for 30 minutes every day”, two things would have happened:

1. I would rush through my reading to read as much as possible because I would feel disappointed if I only managed to read like 10 pages in 30 minutes. So sometimes I would just move on to the next page even if hadn’t quite understood what I had just read. lol
2. Whenever I found the 30 minutes to do it, I would be tired and just postpone the entire reading session for… never

I have been living in Germany for 10 years now and have been more or less sucessful when it comes to reading books. I had years where all I did was read, other years when I had no idea what a book even was and now it’s 2025 and I want to get back into reading.

Here are my reasons for it:

1. Social media is trash and currently run by cis men without balls (Facebook, Instagram), or Nazi billionaires (X)
2. Social media is so damn addictive like Youtube shorts, Tiktok and reddit
3. Social media makes me want to argue with everyone because why are people so stupid? 
4. I want my attention span and my inner peace back. 
5. I want to be in control of what I consume and not let algorithms draw me into doomscrolling
6. I miss the times when the internet was a place of exploration, barely had any politics in it and we were all talking, learning about each other and we had to choose to be connected, now we have to choose to be disconnected because the internet is everywhere.

Will I be successful? Who cares… 

However, I know what will make me feel unsuccessful… and that is the book I want to read at least 5 pages out of everyday…

I’ll write a post about it next

Edit: May 17, 2025: 

You are gonna be shocked, but I never did any of that. I am adding this edit just to not leave the void in a cliffhanger so here it is:

The book I was talking about is Glasperlenspiel (Glass bead game) by Hermann Hesse. My German teacher recommended it to me when I told her that grammar made sense to me, but I was struggling with vocab.... yes... a book that came out in 1943... like girl I know Romania is backwards in many ways, but not that backwards...

Anyway, that book is insanely difficult to read, even for native German speakers, completely unrelatable and kind of a waste of time unless you are interested in that time period. Back in 2011 I fought my way through the first chapter, barely understood anything even with google translate. Then I read some of the second chapter in English, kinda thought I understood something and then I moved onto chatrooms and other content that was more norm... natural. I did think about giving this another try, since I am like C1/C2 in German, but damn. It is just as difficult and unrelatable and weird as I remember, so... nope. I suppose I will wait another 15 years.