Dyslexia: A Year of Reading

I think I’ve read more books this year, well since about November of 2020, than I have in my entire life. To some, that might be surprising, assuming the number is astronomically high. Others will have read the number of times I mention my dyslexia and expect it to be world-shatteringly low. Honestly, I don’t care. It is a personal achievement, no matter how big or small.

You see, I was going to do an article on dyslexia and reading books very early on in the year, as I started this crusade to just suffer. Being dyslexic doesn’t make it impossible to read (or write, for that matter); There are actors, scientists, and numerous professionals that make up the world’s population, all with some degree of dyslexia. It is estimated there are anything between five to seventeen percent of the people clinging to this ever-falling rock in space with the learning difficulty. In the mid-00s, that was lowballed to three percent, or one-hundred and seventy million people. So, no one with it is really that special.

However, this article ran into a few stumbling blocks: My ambition for one, as I set out to make a point on education, but have no touch-stone of what dyslexics went through during this pandemic. I won’t say my education was bad, but it for sure, felt dyslexic apathetic. It often depended on the teacher in each class. I hate to imagine what that is like now, as remote learning had become normal early in the pandemic, and some kids with single parents might not have the means for such learning. The next stumbling block was whether or not to contact education secretaries in the US and UK, seeing what (if any) mandates they set out for the present pandemic and aiding those with learning difficulties.

As you can tell, we never bothered with this, for one reason or another. However, I did go on a bit about why reading has never been as accessible for me as it might be for others. This, of course, meant kicking every living ember of hate out of any memory of teachers or adults suggesting claptrap from Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, or Joanne Rowling. Even getting older, growing into the target age group for The Hunger Games or The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, I hated them all. The suggestion and the suggesters. None of them were at all my thing, and I know why. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my age, always preferring the company of adults rather than children, so children’s stories weren’t helpful.

That’s not to say they can’t help others. By all means, if you like age-appropriate fantasy, you’ll probably like some of them. I say all of this with the audiobooks of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, next to me on CDs. For those of you too young, a CD is a thin cylindrical object that we would laser print information onto; they were your iPod’s storage back in the day. Joking aside, audiobooks are a wonderful thing, and I’ve used them many times. I still recommend them if you want to multitask in Minecraft or do something that an adult would do.

Nevertheless, I’ve always held reading a book as something different from listening to a book. Both more than qualify, but it is a different feeling. Sometimes when listening to an audiobook, it can feel like you are being passive to the story. However, while reading you can feel like you are in it. Of course, that isn’t always true; Stephen King’s 11/22/63 pulled me in while I listened to it, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The biggest issue with audiobooks is the reader’s voice, especially if there is a film version and I’ve planted a voice in my head already.

Be it the genre or the reader, sometimes, you’re just not going to enjoy an audiobook, and that’s fine. I’ve tried J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and didn’t like it. The same is true with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Lord of the Rings. Stephen Fry is wonderful, but I can’t stand Harry Potter. I even disliked the audiobook for the wonderful Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Be it the reader’s voice grating on you, boredom with the story, or general hatred of anything Joanne Rowling has ever done or ever will do, they all have their reasons.

Being dyslexic, there is no one-size-fits-all description as it is such a complex and hard-to-describe thing. I’ve spoken with several dyslexics, none of them giving the same experience as myself or others. As a kid, you just need to find the mechanisms that work to get you by, and sometimes that’s easy. Other times, such as in classes like math or science, you can be told to write out how you got an answer and you just can’t. Learning to read and learning to love reading is much like that. You can’t explain why or how something just isn’t working, but you know it isn’t. I can’t explain why, but I just can’t read those early age-appropriate books, I don’t like them.

The trick that has made me read, and read so much over these last few months, is not just finding what I enjoy. I should say, I may be alone in finding this useful, but jumping between several different books does me the world of good. At this very moment (of writing), I’m jumping between the tail end of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five. I am also drifting between Christopher Eccleston’s I Love the Bones of You, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, and finally Eleven Doctors – Eleven Stories, because I need a bit of Doctor Who. Ok, that might seem like a lot of books, but it is really nothing to my vast library that I have stocked up miles high.

The first question I am sure you think is worth asking is, how do you keep everything straight in your head? The questions I’d be asking are about The Man in the High Castle and Slaughterhouse-Five, both having German in them, but I guess we’ll deal with your question first. They are different books. I don’t stop mid-sentence and read something else, I read up to the chapter’s end or a breakpoint and switch. I’m sure this poses a question of how this is faster and the answer is that I don’t get fatigued by an individual book. I can rest from one and continue to enjoy reading something else.

To answer my question, I’ve spoken German, Japanese, French, and Italian over on our YouTube channel. I might know more than just English. I’m sure the question now is, how is this helping with dyslexia? One of the biggest concerns for any dyslexic is slipping up and catching yourself, often afterward. With that comes a lot of frustration with one’s self over what is in reality, nothing worth beating yourself up about, it happens. Nonetheless, I catch myself out every day, even knowing this deep down. Yet that anger with myself that I require reading a sentence or a paragraph over again is almost crippling. Now multiply that two-three times over each twenty-sum chapters of a book, and you might begin to realize how horrible one book can be.

So, no, it is not helping with dyslexia per se, but it is doing something to pull down those barriers put in place by dyslexia. Being able to switch up books and being able to distract myself from the frustrations of those mistakes or slip-ups, helps me to enjoy reading more. It also helps with the typical things anyone can experience when reading too, boredom with the book itself. There are plenty of reasons too, be it a writer’s (written) voice, the formatting, and a multitude of other reasons to be bored or annoyed with something. Being able to step back and take a breather with something else that may be more enjoyable can help.

I’m not saying it is that easy. You can’t just pick several books for any dyslexic and ascribe that as something they’ll enjoy. Everything I have read and I am currently reading I enjoy, I take from what I already find entertaining or generally enjoyable outside literature and focus in on those. I am someone who deeply enjoys hearing someone’s life story and how they became who they are, so of course, the autobiographies and the occasional biography are my go-to. The first set of books that I ever bought when I was about fifteen included Lee Evans’ Life of Lee, because Lee Evans is a wonderful man and brilliant comedian. Another was Frankie Boyle’s Work! Consume! Die!, a title I think my editor assumes I took as marching orders on life.

Moving further down the timeline, I’ve tried several respective books of discerning genres, and enjoyed a few of them from time to time. Stephen King’s 11/22/63 piqued my interest, as I am sure it does for others, knowing it is a book about JFK’s assassination. I have always found the time period a fascinating one, not only for Kennedy’s death but the parallels with American optimism and endless discrimination of anyone of color. The entire period of the 40s, 50s, and 60s are, to me, another alien world. Adding on top of that, you have King’s horrific detailing coupling horror and simple time travel, the world came to life in my head.

If you couple his time travel and Andy Weir’s space travel in The Martian, you cross over into my home domain. I love sci-fi, as you may have noticed. It is a world of optimism, fantasy, reality, and general survival through either unbelievable situations or simple hardship. So I don’t think it is too far-fetched to believe that I might have every Doctor Who and Star Trek book I can get my hands on. That is including technical manuals and Gene Roddenberry’s 1987 story bible for the writers and directors of TNG. With King’s 11/22/63, you also have the alt-history section of sci-fi that I do enjoy with The Man in the High Castle too.

Like most anyone else, I have dabbled in a thriller and general fantasy, enjoying little bits here and there. The point I am trying to make here is, I’ve had the ability to experiment, and I’ve given it the time to explore. Some, for whatever reason, don’t have the capacity for that, since books aren’t always cheap. I am also fortunate enough to have such a backing to get into reading, while others might not have that same support around them to read everything and anything. Some don’t have access to read something that challenges the beliefs of a parent or carer, which can be contentious at times.

None of this is to say that suddenly reading several different books will make you a faster read, or a better reader overall. Yes, you may end up reading a little more, enjoying more books, and progressively getting quicker and finding it easier to read. However, that is as much a consequence of reading so much as it is anything else. You may still find boredom in prolonged reading, which takes me back to something my editor Alexx reminded me of: Games.

Of course, the site is called Phenixx Gaming, so as you might expect, there is a fair bit of gaming content on the site. Often, many games can for-go a voice actor or two in favor of a text-heavy game, which for some is very easy. As I’ve stated before, these were always a barrier for me as a dyslexic of a young age, still without the love of reading or general desire. I’d go as far as to say, those were partially the reason I did find derision toward reading in the first place. Now, of course, you can’t really say “switch up the game you are playing every 20-minutes,” because that is an unreasonable thing to suggest. I don’t care who you are, you don’t want to switch between Fallout 4, Dark Souls, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that quickly.

In fact, for all that I find hatred for near high/epic fantasy, not particularly enjoying A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones all that much; I love a bit of Dark Souls. I don’t know what it is about it, but a few others (much like myself) love the series. Dyslexics and Dark Souls just mix well. I think it is the emphasis of gameplay over all else that does it. Some might ignore the story, but it is there and seeping into them nonetheless. Though, when I talk about games and reading, there are a litany of concerns that can come up: Exposition heavy-dialogue, timed responses, and stylized text all making up some common grievances.

Now, if you are dyslexic or you know someone who is, I don’t want this to be seen as a how-to guide on how to “get over dyslexia.” I saw that treatment first-hand this weekend. I want everyone to understand and to stop saying dyslexia is something you can beat or something you can get over, “he was a dyslexic,” and so on. It is not something you beat, it is not something you get over, it is just something you learn to live with and move on with. There is nothing to beat. There are barriers and there are hurdles, but you can cross them and you can learn to cut through them with support and your own mechanisms to overcome them.

Ultimately, what is helping me not only read a few more books in under a year but also enjoy reading, is finding what I enjoy first and foremost. Then, on top of all of this, I give myself the breathing room to enjoy each book at my own pace. That pace may be one, two, or three chapters before switching books again. As I said at the top, my own little achievement this past year might not be as grand as “BookTubers” who read a book a week, but it is my accomplishment, not someone else’s. Ultimately, as a dyslexic, you need to learn to take whatever success you have as your own, and stop looking at friends, parents, family, and others, as the yardstick.