I grew up a voracious reader. As a child, I often found myself immersed in the worlds of Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and Harry Potter. When we visited Pakistan for the summer holidays, I would return to Dubai — suitcase stuffed beyond capacity with books I had bought with my pocket money, arms aching because I decided, sensibly or not, to carry a dozen more from the tiny bookshop at Karachi airport’s departure lounge. I even have a childhood photo of me holding a book at a family wedding.

At 9 years old, I picked up my brother’s copy of Angela’s Ashes. What my still-young brain understood of it, I do not quite remember. But Frank McCourt’s account of a poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland lodged itself somewhere permanent in my mind. To this day, I think about the rain-soaked neighbourhood he described — a place I had never seen, a life utterly unlike mine — rendered with such vividness that I almost believe I lived there too. That book (awarded the Pulitzer Prize) has followed me into adulthood.

I read anything and everything. In my whims and fancies, I imagined myself a great intellectual, grasping Paulo Coelho with a seriousness that felt profound at the time; exotic philosophies and esoteric ideas that helped me make sense of my teenage anxiety, or at least dignify it. I begrudgingly read Brontë, an obligation courtesy of the private school I was educated in. I devoured voyeuristic autobiographies of Arab princesses rescued by Western feminists, stories that planted early questions about power, gender disparity and who gets to tell whose story. I read about honour killings and ethnic genocides, narratives that would later shape my desire to become a journalist.

Cliché as it sounds, books gave me access to worlds and ways of being that life hadn't yet allowed me to physically explore.

And yet. Somewhere along the way, reading changed.

Or rather, I did.

When I joined university in 2010, social media was in its infancy. Instagram had just launched and new avenues of self-expression were emerging, slowly but insistently reshaping how we paid attention to the world. As academic life tightened its grip, reading became purposeful, extractive. To be taken seriously, you had to read non-fiction. You had to know facts, context, real-world implications.

Reading for pleasure quietly slipped into the background. Ironic, considering I was surrounded by more texts than ever before. Fiction became indulgent, something to return to after you had earned your intellectual credibility. What could a novel possibly teach me that a case study or long-form investigative piece couldn’t?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Somehow, we as a collective have come to treat non-fiction as the superior option, as if only books that instruct or document are worthwhile. This is where I think intellectualising reading begins to kill curiosity — not because thinking deeply is bad, but because reading becomes performative.

To be clear, non-fiction matters deeply. It teaches us of our past as humanity. It gives language to injustice and evidence to our existence. But when non-fiction becomes the only legitimate form of reading, something essential is lost. Fiction does something non-fiction often can't: it trains you to sit with ambiguity. To inhabit another mind without immediately categorising it. To understand the world not as data, but as lived texture – contradictory, emotional, unresolved. It teaches empathy.

I have since realised that my distance from books wasn't a personal failure of discipline or taste. Reading had stopped being fun when it became a performance — when non-fiction was elevated as the “serious” choice and fiction was relegated to the optional. The pressure to intellectualise every page made curiosity feel risky, wonder optional. That experience was compounded by structural gaps: we were expected to finish books, but not taught how to engage with them. We weren’t taught how to sit with confusion, argue with the text or to return to a sentence and let it change us.

Instead, we had to memorise lines and regurgitate “important quotes”. Literature is a dance of meaning between the writer’s voice and the reader’s mind. In school, it was an assessment on language, literary devices and themes you had to “take away”.

My only take away was that reading was solitary, timed and an assessment of your academic capability.

There was no visible reading culture, nor a shared joy around books. As adulthood settled in, time became scarce. Occasionally, I would pick up a book-sequel to a viral podcast and devour it in a day. Investigative accounts of women killed in the name of honour, or exposes on the clandestine world of Sufi shrines, piqued my interest sporadically. I would be moved by Kamila Shamsie and Arundhati Roy’s vision of the postcolonioal identity just the same. But reading had become episodic; intense, then absent.

I find this striking though, because I grew up in a reading household. My brother was a quiet bookworm. My sister couldn’t digest a meal without a book accompanying her at mealtimes. My mother read more than any woman I knew at the time, her personal library a quiet monument to the greats of Urdu literature: Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib. Books existed everywhere around me, and yet I had no idea how to make meaning of them.

This is where education systems matter. To raise a generation of readers, schools must teach reading as a practice: slow, dialogic, unfinished. Not simply what a text means, but how to engage with it. Without this, many people don’t just lose their love for reading; they simply never learn how to sustain it.

Debates around attention spans and policies like Australia’s social media ban for young people are being hotly debated. Ironically, the same platforms accused of eroding attention also reintroduced me to reading. It was social media that helped me find my way back to reading for pleasure. Book recommendations, annotations shared publicly, strangers obsessing collectively over characters and plots made reading something much bigger: a community.

The UAE has made visible efforts to cultivate a reading culture through national reading initiatives, public campaigns, literary festivals and the construction of libraries. These efforts matter in the wider aim of creating a reading culture, which relies not on access alone but on collective participation.

Reading today is a quiet resistance. It asks something radical of us: sustained attention. In a world that rewards speed, reading has become one of the few remaining spaces that allows slowness without apology. It offers a brief return to an analogue way of being. As an adult, I noticed the cost of sidelining reading. At work, I could craft words, marshal facts, and execute with precision, yet I began to notice the edges of my own perspective.

Not reading, I have learned, isn't a moral failing. But finding a way back is a responsibility. Our gaps in knowledge aren't always our fault, but they are ours to tend to. No system, festival, or algorithm can do that work for us.

I have begun reading again, annotating thoughts and scribbling questions in the margins of my books. It keeps me connected when my mind threatens to wander. I now curate my reading list with an honesty I didn’t allow myself before. Frankenstein and Anna Karenina sit alongside self-bound fan fiction and viral “dark academia” recommendations from BookTok. A deeply non-judgemental TBR (to-be-read list, for all you non-abbreviating folks in the wild) driven by one simple rule: curiosity over performative intellectualism.

They say books have a way of finding you at the right time. Or perhaps we finally arrive at them as the people we need to be to receive them.

So here I am, in my 30s, learning how to read.