Flying to New Endings

I have quite a few flights booked this November, and I am looking forward to using the down time catching up on some reading. I started reading for leisure in freshman year of high school, and the first book I ever read was The Love Story by Erich Segal. It was a quick read and happened to be mentioned in a movie I had watched that year.

From the very beginning of the book I was hooked. I started in the morning and I was done with the book in the afternoon; this book was an easy read. That year I read many young adult/teen romance books, sharing the books with the entire class in high school. I went through most fictional books written by Erich Segal that year, reading Acts of Faith from cover to cover during a 24 hour layover at Abu Dhabi airport (we had missed the flight). The 24 hours flew by without any realization on my part.

However, since then I have developed a sort of abandonment issue when it comes to completing books. I have found myself at the last 100 or 50 pages of the book and letting it collect dust on the shelf for a long time. I don't pick it back up to finish it for months. I find myself thinking that the characters have to live on until I decide to read the end; it's ridiculous how much I get attached to characters in a book. It is reasonable because I read their intimate thoughts and I develop a closeness with them but that's ridiculous. Recently, I have been in this situation with the Harry Potter series. I read the first three books when I was in high school, enjoying every bit of it. Then, I moved on to more young adult/adult books that covered some sort of profound topic.

                         Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

This changed when I visited Universal Studios, LA in 2018 and walking through the Harry Potter world brought back memories of when I was reading it in high school. So, I decided to pick the series up where I left off. I read through the fourth, fifth and sixth book in a matter of weeks but I haven't read past the first few pages for months now. I have quite a few opportunities to read and I have decided that it is time to complete this series. Onwards to endings!