READING AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE

GRACE JI-SUN KIM encourages us to see reading in a new light.

- GRACE JI-SUN KIM

I DIDN’T GROW UP READING.

I grew up so poor that buying books would have been a luxury. Except for the two beds that my sister and I slept on, everything in our tiny apartment was donated, secondhand, or retrieved from the dumpster. That is how we lived. There were no books when I was growing up.

One day, my dad found a picture book at his work and brought it home. That was the only book I had as a child and I read it repeatedly. As the child of immigrants from Korea, I couldn’t even read English at that time. I made up the story from the pictures and pretended that I was reading the words. I can still clearly visualize the story and the pictures, as I read it thousands of times.

Growing up with no books around me, becoming an author of more than 20 books and the host of a podcast with extraordinary authors is something that I never envisioned for my life when I was a young child.

I immigrated to Canada when I was five years old. I didn’t speak a word of English. I started kindergarten and I slowly began to learn the English language. I only read books that were required reading in my classes during elementary school. Since my parents didn’t understand the logistics of borrowing books from a public library, we never went to one.