First day of school, 3^rd grade. My nine-year-old self had just got to class and was catching up with friends after the break. It went something like this:

Me: “Yoooo, you watch that last Pokémon episode?”

Bro: “Yeah, bro, that was a crazy fight”

Me: “Greninja was done dirty, man, he should’ve won”

Bro: “For sure, for sure. Hey, you read the Eng Lit book? That was fire”

Me: “…” 

Me: “What?!”

I looked around, waiting to join the rest of my friends in calling this guy a nerd. I did not expect all of them to instead join him and start glazing the book. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t even know its name. Being left out of the conversation was annoying, so after going home, I took out the book and decided to give it a go. 

It was called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and had been written by someone named Roald Dahl. This was not my first time with a storybook, but it was my first time with a chapter book. The books I had read before had not managed to impress me, probably because they were extremely childish. Nevertheless, I began reading. I read the first page. Then another. Then 2 more. Then 4. Before long, I had lost track of the pages and was completely lost in the book. I wasn’t reading words, I was experiencing someone’s life. I could see the skinny figure of Charlie Bucket run past the mysterious Wonka factory on his way to and from school. I could feel the warmth and love in the hut where the Buckets lived, despite their poverty. I could smell the cabbage soup Charlie’s mom was cooking. Wildest of all, I was craving the chocolate of Willy Wonka. My mouth still waters when I remember the name: Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. The book wasn’t just interesting; it was weird. Living eggs made of sugar that hatched and died in one’s mouth, a palace made of chocolate that melts in the sun, a factory where everything is made from a river of chocolate- the book was insane. 

I hadn’t even realised, but I finished half the book in one evening. My life was very different from that day on. All of a sudden, my greatest addiction was reading. I would pick up whatever I could and give it a go, including the newspaper (yeah, I’m a gen Z that reads the paper- rare species I know!), trying to feel what I felt with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sometimes I’d be disappointed, but other times I’d feel that joy again. Some books would affirm my thoughts and ideas, while others would change them. Books even taught me to express myself more clearly. I am proud to say that my writing style is a cheap copy of Harry Potter, while my conversation style is a poor imitation of Percy Jackson’s dialogue. 

Additionally, the book showed me how interesting English can be. Until then, I thought of English as dumb. I was still in Bangladesh at the time, and had been studying English according to the strict British curriculum my school followed. Up to that point, my experience with English had just been rules and systems, which sometimes didn’t make a lot of sense to an 8-year-old. Why do we need to know 5 words for the same thing? Why does subject-verb agreement matter? Why is “mans” grammatically incorrect? Just lemme write what I want to! Well, Roald Dahl did exactly that. He made up his own words, threw grammatical consistency out the window and wrote a book that can only be described as a fever dream. 

That book taught me to play around with language and have fun writing whatever I feel like. That definitely helped me connect with English more, especially as I wrote some of my own stories (that will never see the light of day because they are cringe beyond human reason). It gave me a passion and love for reading and has indirectly played a huge role in shaping who I have become as a person.