How a Game Reawakened My Love for Reading

My DnD Collection

 

Are you like me and love to read? You want to turn that page to find out what happens next, and you want to get lost in worlds of monsters and aliens or romance and political intrigue. Are you also like me, in the sense that at times you face a reading lull and won’t pick up a book for weeks at a time?

Well, I was in that same predicament very recently.

I was an English major in college, meaning that 75% of my time was devoted to nothing but reading. I usually had five different books I had to read each week, and I would try to include my recreational reading in there as well, which I learned was unmanageable. Who has time to read for pleasure when that’s what you have to do for class? I was reading everything from Hemingway to Austen, O’Connor to Shakespeare. And it was great. I loved reading that stuff. I just wished that I had had time to read the books that I wanted to read.

When I finally graduated in May of 2018, I was relieved that I could finally read anything I wanted to. It was time to dive back into those Young Adult and Fantasy books that I enjoyed as a high schooler.

But I discovered something.

I was now less inclined to read.

I found that reading was the last thing I wanted to do. My attention span could no longer focus long enough to stick with a book. I would start a new novel, and after about a quarter of the way through, I would want to read something else, or just not read at all. My brain was all over the place, and I discovered reading wasn’t something I wanted to do that much anymore. And this was probably partly because of my four years of rigorous reading in undergrad.

This was distressing for me. I wasn’t reading like I wanted to.

That is until I started playing Dungeons and Dragons.

If you don’t know, Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop roleplaying game where you play as a character you create and delve into a fantasy world to fight monsters with friends. It’s filled with elves, dragons, wizards, and an innumerable cast of other fantastical creatures. I started playing the game with friends of mine, and this got me reading again.

“How?” you may ask. Well, it just so happens that there are Dungeons and Dragons novels. And currently I am devouring them. They are based around the worlds that act as settings of the game, and they feature battles of dark elves with minotaurs, dragons and sorcery, and all other sorts of cool things. Playing the game made me want to read the books and experience more of these fantasy worlds, and now I have been scouring bookstores, buying them left and right. And no, I wouldn’t say they are “great works of literature,” but they are stories I enjoy, and at the end of the day, that’s one of the most important things about reading books: you read ones that you enjoy.

So, thanks to a game, I am back into reading, and I will continue reading the Dungeons and Dragons novels which will undoubtedly lead me to reading books in other genres. After all, the world is a library waiting to be read.