Books liberated me from a narrow world when I was young. Phones and laptops do the same job today
At about the age of 10, I fell down a reading rabbit hole. I would like to tell you that the reason for this was that I was bookish beyond my years, but the truth is that there was nothing else to do. It was Sudan in the 90s. There was only one TV channel, which offered military parades and propaganda. Most of the time there was no electricity available to watch it anyway. I had no friends or relatives my age who lived nearby, and so to come home from school was to enter a black hole of inactivity. So I read anything I could get my hands on, escaping from what was in hindsight a sort of airless, inert unhappiness.
One day, as I was trying discreetly to read a book under the dinner table, my parents snapped. Unnerved by my addiction and how unsociable it made me, they banned me from reading at home and ordered that I collect all the books I had hoarded from the library and return them. I remember fishing them out of different nooks and crannies I had cultivated around the house and piling them up, with a growing terror of the impending boredom once they were gone.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2CSUgTk
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