The accidental reader

I was never a reader. Not in a self-deprecating, fishing-for-recommendations way — I mean it the way you’d describe something physical about yourself, like being left-handed or unable to sleep on planes. It just wasn’t how I was wired.

As a kid I was the loud one. The one who showed up to school having already played football for an hour and a half on the handball court with a handful of equally bouncy friends, and still couldn’t sit still through maths. I joined every sport that was on offer, was always talking, always moving. My legs specifically could not stop. I have restless leg syndrome — RLS, if you want a label for what is essentially your nervous system deciding that stillness is a personal insult. It made sitting through a full school lesson an exercise in quiet suffering, the kind where you develop a very detailed relationship with the second hand of the classroom clock. You can imagine how I felt about voluntarily curling up with a book in my free time. Books were for people whose legs didn’t vibrate at idle. I had other things to burn.

I did technically read the required school books. Well. “Read.” The system went like this: read a page, skip 10. Read another page, skip 20. Glance at the last chapter. Tell myself I’d made a serious effort. The books obviously knew. I arrived at every class discussion armed with exactly the general shape of a story and zero useful specifics, radiating the quiet confidence of someone who had absolutely done the reading. It worked well enough, and honestly I didn’t feel bad about it. The attention simply wasn’t there. The words didn’t catch. Live and let live — some people love football, some people love Dickens. I was clearly in the first camp, and I wasn’t going to spend too much energy apologising for it.

To be fair to myself, I should clarify what “not a reader” actually meant. Technical books were a completely different story — I devoured those. Programming books, documentation, long-form articles, deep dives into whatever I was trying to learn that week. That kind of reading I could do for hours, because it had a direction, a purpose, a problem it was helping me solve. My entire autodidactic learning journey — which I’ll write about properly another time — was built on exactly that kind of reading. Any tech person who says they don’t read is usually lying; we read constantly, just not novels. So the distinction was always specifically about fiction, about stories, about sitting down with a novel and surrendering to it for no reason other than that it was good. That kind of reading didn’t compute for me. The goal-oriented brain couldn’t find the foothold.

Where the energy actually went

For most of my life, the thing I turned to for real relaxation was video games. That probably doesn’t shock anyone who’s met me — the overlap between “hyperactive kid who grew up” and “person who finds joy in games” is basically a circle. Games were the thing I could genuinely lose myself in after a long day. A good RPG, a tight action game, something with depth and world and story to unpick — that was my off switch. The thing that made the rest of the noise go quiet for a while. And unlike books, they actually held my attention, because they demanded it in a different way. They moved. They reacted. There was always something happening.

Then the kids came, and something about that particular escape became quietly unavailable in the same way.

It’s not that I stopped playing entirely — I still do, and the Steam Deck is one of the best purchases I’ve made in years for exactly the reason that it at least makes gaming portable. But gaming at the level where it’s actually restorative requires a specific kind of uninterrupted time and mental presence that two small children have a remarkable talent for dismantling. You need to be able to sit down properly, settle in, give it your actual attention. A game you pick up for 15 minutes between dinner and bath time is not relaxing — it’s a tease that leaves you more frustrated than when you started. To really sink into a game the way I used to, you need an evening. A proper one.

So there was a gap. The old reliable escape route had become logistically complicated, and I hadn’t really found anything to replace it.

The wife effect

My wife is a genuine bookworm. I mean this with complete respect and slightly awed incomprehension. She loves books the way some people love music — viscerally, devotionally, with a particular look on her face when she’s deep in a good one that makes it very clear she is not really in this room anymore. Her bookshelves are a serious thing. When she reorganises them — and she does this with some regularity — she enters what I can only describe as a transcendent state: a focused calm that it would be genuinely cruel to interrupt. Quietly sacred in a way I’ve learned not to question or disturb. I just leave her to it and do something else until she resurfaces, looking satisfied in a way I find both baffling and endearing.

There’s a story from early in our relationship that I find funnier every time I think about it. My family has a place in the countryside — an old house with a garden, the kind of place that accumulates decades of stuff in every corner. One of the first times I brought her there, my family happened to be clearing it out, and among the things being cleared were a pile of old, battered, genuinely unusable books that had been sitting there for years. They went on the fire. So one of her earliest impressions of my family involved standing next to a bonfire of burning books — lit by us, the people she was presumably trying to make a good impression on. A great introduction. I remember thinking it was a slightly awkward detail to explain, though I also couldn’t argue that the books had any particular use left in them. They were genuinely old rubbish. Still — not the most literary first act. The woman who would eventually turn me into someone who actually reads books: among her earliest memories of my family is them burning some. (To be fair, they’d met before — but not by much. Close enough for the story.)

When we moved into our first place together, books came with her — on the shelves, on the nightstand, on the kitchen table, in her hands. And somewhere in that new daily proximity, something quietly shifted. A title would catch my eye. I’d ask about it. I’d find myself picking one up out of mild curiosity rather than genuine intent to read it, and then reading a few pages anyway. She never made it a campaign — never left books on my pillow with a hopeful note, never suggested I really ought to try reading more. She just lived her reading life openly around me and trusted that proximity would do the rest. It did. That’s probably the most her way of doing things I can think of: quietly, without fuss, and it works anyway.

And then the penny dropped in a slightly different way. Books are quiet. Not in the sense that you can read through any amount of chaos — you still need a reasonably calm evening and a brain that’s willing to settle. But that’s exactly the point: reading asks you to slow down, and slowing down is the whole thing. After a long day, the last thing I actually need is more stimulation — more flashing lights, more adrenaline, more being switched on. A book doesn’t do any of that. It goes in the opposite direction. You sit, the noise fades, and for an hour or so the day stops pressing on you. Gaming was always exciting. A book is just calm. And calm, it turns out, was what I was actually looking for — not another way to be switched on, just a way to stop being. Carving out your own patch of light while the horizon darkens, even when the horizon is just tomorrow’s to-do list and the darkness is bedtime routine.

The books that actually stuck

I should say — none of these were random finds. My wife recommended all of them. She’s read enough books for 10 people and apparently paid enough attention to me over the years to have a decent model of what would actually land. I suspect that’s not an accident. She started me off gently: The Last Wish, the first Witcher collection, which turned out to be a smart pick. The short-story format meant no 600-page commitment, just a series of tight standalone tales in a world that was immediately interesting — dark, funny, morally grubby, with a protagonist who’s seen too much to be naive about anything. Each story was just long enough to pull me in and short enough to finish before my attention started looking for the exit. Something caught.

Comics and graphic novels came into the picture around the same time, courtesy of a few well-chosen gifts. I’m not going to overcomplicate it — they’re fun, they move fast, and they don’t ask a lot from a brain that still has trouble sitting still. Good gateway drug. No notes.

Then came The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher — again, her recommendation — and that’s where I really settled in. Harry Dresden is exactly the right kind of protagonist for someone who came in through the Witcher: weathered, wry, perpetually in over his head in a world that’s bigger and weirder than it looks. I worked through the first few books steadily, then at some point she handed me Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir as a kind of detour, and I went with it. Fast, funny, full of science that feels just convincing enough to never stop and question — the protagonist MacGyvers his way through one impossible situation after another, and before you’ve had time to wonder whether any of it actually works, something new and even more interesting is already happening. By chapter three I had no interest in putting it down. After that I picked the Dresden Files back up and I’m still going, slowly, at whatever pace the week allows. There are stretches where I don’t touch it for a while. That’s fine. It’s still there when I come back, and I still enjoy it when I do. I’ve also been eyeing the Agatha Christie novels lately — my wife and I have been watching Poirot in the evenings together, and at some point the inevitable happened and I started wondering about the books. That’s probably the next rabbit hole. No goodreads account, no annual reading target, no optimisation. I’m not that reader, and I have no plans to become one.

I’m not a bookworm. Probably never will be. My wife can keep that title — she’s earned it and she wears it well.

But I’m a person who reads now, slowly, on his own terms, in the margins of a full and genuinely noisy life. And that happened not because I forced it or self-improved my way into it, but because the conditions of my life shifted until a book was the thing that fit. The right medium for the right moment — the renaissance of the everyday man not in some grand sense, but in the quiet sense of finding a small thing that works, and letting it in.

The legs still move, for the record. But I read anyway.