The Time I Read a Book in One Day

              It all started on a school day back in my home country Suriname in South America. During school on this particular day, I was thinking about a book I read the week prior. It was a Dutch book about a set of twin brothers who went on adventures with their boat, in their small town in the Netherlands. That was one of many of the series and probably the 2^nd or 3^rd book I read of it. After school I went home and waited for my mother to bring me to the local library, which was on the end of my block. When she finally came home from work, I went with her and my sister to the library to rent a new book. I knew I was going to try to find another book from that series, and luckily, they happened to have one I hadn’t read yet. I say luckily as this wasn’t a big library and they didn’t have the whole series of the book available. After I chose the book and checked out, we returned home and I immediately started reading it. I had been waiting for this moment the whole day, so it is fair to say I was excited to start reading the twins’ story again.

Now I haven’t really mentioned why I chose this as my subject for WLLN. The reason for this is because on that day I would do something I had never done before in the 13 years of my life. I managed to finish that whole book within a day! And as soon as I started reading that book on that warm sunny afternoon, I just knew I would have to finish it on that same day.

I read the whole afternoon long and didn’t even stop to play a little bit of soccer in my garden as I normally would. The only time I stopped was when I had to eat dinner and when I had to take a bath before going to bed. Before dinner we usually watched an episode of “The Simpsons” and “Tien Minuten Jeugd Journaal”, a local news segment for kids which aired on tv, that day however I didn’t. I stayed outside reading the book until I genuinely couldn’t continue as the sun had already set and our fluorescent lamp which we had outside didn’t produce enough light suitable for reading. And so, with a little bit of a headache and dry and itchy eyes from not blinking enough while reading, I went inside and ate the dinner my mom had prepared. Immediately after dinner I said goodnight to my parents and grandparents and went upstairs to quickly take a bath so I could continue reading this fascinating book. My bedtime was normally around 8:30 to 9:00 pm, but that day I stayed up until at least 1:00 am just to finish the book, as I couldn’t stop reading. The following day, after it sunk in what I had done, I started to think about why I was able to finish that book in around 7 hours and what I felt afterwards.

The first thing I noticed was the sense of accomplishment I felt after being able to finish a book within a day. It wasn’t my goal when I started reading, but it felt good nonetheless. After experiencing this sense of accomplishment, I started reading my next books with the goal of finishing them as soon as possible. Even though I made that my goal I wasn’t able to replicate this ever again.

Another thing I noticed was the reason why I was able to read this book within a day. I was able to do this because I had started reading books more regularly before this one. What’s more is that I wasn’t just reading quicker without understanding every detail of the story, instead I was now able to read quicker and even understood stories better. The final thing I took from this experience, was how encaptivated I was by the story and how just a bunch of words on paper could spur my imagination into thinking that I was part of the adventures of the twins. This was the reason why I couldn’t stop reading, the author had somehow managed to pull me into the world of the twins. And this was when I realized how powerful books can be and what it takes to be an author.