‘A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, if it’s to keep its edge. That is why I read so much.’ - George R R Martin, Game of Thrones

Reading is one of the earliest hobbies I can remember. Our local library had a mobile van that would park at our local park every Thursday, and I would get through whatever I could.

I started with the usual kid’s books, following on to my early forays into comic books - Tintin, and Asterix and Obelix. At some point, the nice lady behind the desk suggested to my mum that I might want to give this new book series a go that had been getting quite popular, which is how I started reading Harry Potter.

I was hooked. Reading became a salvation, even back then when the most I had to worry about was school. Goosebumps, Animorphs, Darren Shan, wider and wider my net grew. It took a few years, though, before I found something else that captured my mind quite as much as Potter. That was at a random books fair at school when I was about 13 or 14, where I found The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

Nowadays, my tastes range from sci-fi to romance, hard non-fiction to high fantasy. My bookshelf hosts everything from Bill Bryson, Oliver Burkeman, Tolkien, and Stephen King, to John Green (both fiction and non-fiction), and Graham Norton. There’s also One Hundred Years of Solitude, but that has a rare spot on my Did Not Finish list.

But as my days grew harder and longer, it became far quicker to get sucked into Reddit than it did actual books or even blogs. Where once I was able to devour Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in three days after its release, now I’m lucky to manage 20 pages an hour, and even then that’s assuming I can read for an hour without interruption from work, sleep, or Priorities.

The way out? Read wider, read better, and sharpen that mind. Replace that instinct to fire up social media and pick up a book, find a new and engaging blog, read an essay in the Atlantic. Actually stretch my mind rather than let it rot. Go back to that salvation, and sharpen my sword.