The idea of reading books has always been an overwhelming subject for me. Ever since I was a child, I was never really interested in reading books. I thought books were boring in general unless there were illustrations on each page. I did read novels in my teen years out of boredom, and I read mostly nonfiction books during my “self-discovery” New Age phase. I bought all these books because I wanted to learn something new. Did I get pleasure from reading books? Absolutely not—and that’s something I am still learning how to do.

I am currently not looking for something to learn about specific interests. When I started collecting these old vintage books, I thought they were so interesting because the actual books are old and have many stories to tell. It is purely for nostalgic and aesthetic reasons that I was drawn to these books. Once I opened each of these beloved vintage items, I felt like I was back in time. Maybe it’s the way they were written, the smell of old paper, the handwritten names on the front pages, and the fact that they come from a time when smartphones, the internet, and social media didn’t exist yet—that, for me, is something worth digging into.

Just to be transparent, I haven’t finished reading even one book since buying them almost a month ago. I start reading one book, then stop, then move on to another. I’m in this loop where I feel out what I want to read at the moment, maybe read a few pages that day, put it away, and then almost forget about it. The first book I tried reading was Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I read about 50 pages that night and then completely forgot to pick it up again. I was planning on reading every night before going to sleep, but that hasn’t been the reality.

In my ideal world, I would like to start reading again in my downtime. Instead of using my phone and scrolling mindlessly on social media while sitting on the couch, I would put my phone away and grab these vintage old books instead. In fact, this is something I have been doing in the past few days. My kids are usually all around me, trying to grab my attention, and I end up reading to them instead. My toddler’s current obsession is all about cats, so she hands me her cat books—specifically Three to Get Ready by Betty Boegehold. Reading it at least twice a day, it’s become a household favorite.

There’s definitely something about holding an old book and slowly reading it with no goals or intention of finishing the whole thing, while being open to curiosity about what the book is all about. I wouldn’t call myself a bookworm, because I don’t think I ever will be (but never say never, right?). I am, however, open to the idea of constantly being curious and wondering which book is calling me to open it. These books are all random. The only thing they have in common is that they’re old, and the world at that time was completely different from the world I am currently living in. Perhaps there’s a part of me that will always crave that old nostalgia—when the world felt much simpler, but also truer and fuller.