Personal Essay: The Book That Made Me Fall in Love with Reading

By Sara Swallow

It’s the summer of 2015 and I’m bored out of my mind because I can’t drive yet. I’m sitting at home scrolling through Instagram, back when the icon was the brown camera and had blue accents, and I’m seeing my friends post pictures of their beach trips (#beachlife). I wish I was anywhere but here, stuck at home. (2020 me is looking back at 2015-Sara and shaking my head saying: Girl, if only you knew how much you wouldn't want to be stuck in the house).

I head into my younger sister Sammy’s room. She’s got all her books sprawled out, making her summer reading list. I loved to read as a younger kid, but school had put me in a reading rut. I ask Sammy what I should read next and she asks, “Have you read Percy Jackson yet?”

“No,” I say.

She hands me the first two books. “You can come see me tomorrow for the next books.”

​I laugh because even though I think I'm a fast reader, but two books in that short of time seemed a little wild to me. 

I head up to my room, and light my one of my many candles to set the mood for getting into a book. I open up Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan and I get to reading. Once there were Furies wrecking museums, I was hooked. I read all through the day and into the night to finish the first two books, and the next day, I went to Sammy and asked her for the next books. She smiled and said, “I know, right?” 

Percy Jackson was to me what Harry Potter was to so many others. I went into fangirl-mode just as everyone else my age was pretty much coming out of their book fangirling and moving into actor/actress fangirling. This series was unlike anything I had experienced before--mostly because I had only read books with mainly white, male average characters. Though the main character Percy is white, he comes from a non-traditional family, witnesses domestic abuse, is neurodivergent with ADHD and dyslexia, and has a non-traditional schooling experience. There are so many topics being covered in this story--whether it’s good versus evil, the meaning of family, or dealing with loss--but all the language is approachable, since it’s written for a middle-school audience. The language makes the topics significantly more digestible since I’m not getting caught up in wild terminologies and having the point-of-view of a young kid makes things a little more straight-forward. Then, when all the Greek mythology came in, I was so thankful that Percy was about as clueless as I was. 

Riordan made Greek mythology palatable and appealing to me through this story because I was exposed to almost all the Greek gods and goddesses and certain pieces of Greek history. Some traditionalists may turn up their noses when I say that I learned 95% of what I know about Greek mythology from a book made for middle schoolers, but just because I didn’t spend hours reading difficult works doesn’t make my knowledge any less valuable or valid. I may not have felt as elite as my peers while reading this book while they were reading Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for fun, but I still enjoyed reading it.

Percy Jackson showed me that I can read just for the fun of it. I can read and witness how myth and reality can meld together. Percy Jackson made me fall in love with reading (and I still have a whole Pinterest board dedicated to the series).