Most kids remember their first bike or a scraped knee. I remember the day I committed social suicide at age eight. My teacher was guilty of the ultimate sin: she forgot to assign math homework. While my classmates were likely celebrating their freedom, I was walking back to the school gates to inform her of the oversight. I left with a custom assignment and a level of smugness that has, quite frankly, never left my body. My classmates were not impressed; I, however, was just getting started.

By eleven, I was sitting in Religion Education class (I’m Eastern European, get used to the random info dump that doesn’t connect), ignoring the sermon to inventory my own “holy” texts. I sat there and methodically listed every book I’d ever finished. The tally hit over 100. Sure, modern “BookTok” influencers claim to hit that in a year, but for a pre-teen in the pre-digital era? I was a God.

To understand the source of this “Paper Addiction,” you only have to look at the family tree. I was raised by a pack of teachers, people who treated books like oxygen. My mother read me to sleep every night, and when her voice gave out, she’d fire up the record player to play vinyl stories. I was into audiobooks before they were cool, honey.

The real “Book Demon” was forged in the summer I turned seven.

We were at the seaside, the sun was out, and I was content to stay in my lane. In my mind, reading was a “grown-up” activity, something I’d be allowed to do once I was old enough to down some spirits. Then, I saw it: my cousin – six months younger than me, mind you – sitting on the beach, casually reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on his own.

It was egregious. It was an insult. It triggered a tantrum of epic, snot-filled proportions. I stomped my ass into the sand until my mother relented and bought me my first book just to shut me up. Score!

From that moment on, the beast was unleashed. Taking a book away from me became a high-stakes tactical manoeuvre that no sane person attempted.

The low point (or high point, depending on who you ask) came at age nine. I failed my calligraphy exam. My parents, knowing exactly where to twist the knife, decided that the appropriate punishment was not to get me Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban until my handwriting improved. It was a dire, dark time.

Lucky me, my dealer (grandpa) helped me score my next hit. He found the entire punishment ridiculous, and in a move that taught me everything I need to know about loyalty and subversion, he bought the book and smuggled it to me. I spent my days as a literary fugitive, reading in secret on his balcony. We had a pact: once my grades improved and my mother calmed down, he’d publicly “gift” me the book.

The Great YA Heist

Even with my “Reading Demon” status, I lived by a strictly self-imposed hierarchy. My library was a series of rigid boxes: the “Kid Classics” (Harry Potter and national treasures of fiction), the “School Slogs” (national historical fiction, which, contrary to expectations, I absolutely adored), and finally, the “Adult Forbidden Fruit.” These were the texts I assumed were guarded by the Gods of the Library, not to be touched until I was granted some mythical, literary clearance. I was a “special” kind of naive: a teenager who respected invisible laws that didn’t even exist.

This personal bureaucracy came to a head when I was sixteen. I was browsing the stuffy, narrow aisles of my local bookstore when I found it: Giuseppe Culicchia’s Wonderland. It was love at first sight. The title, the itsy bitsy sentences I managed to skim through, it was everything I wanted. But as I reached for it, I froze.

The book was sitting on the “Young Adult” shelf.

My internal alarm bells went off. I was sixteen. I’d had my first sips of spirits by then, but I certainly didn’t have a “Literary ID” to prove I was allowed to handle YA content. I panicked. I assumed the bookstore keeper was basically a border guard, and if I tried to buy it, I’d be arrested for impersonating a person of mature taste. I left the shop with my tail between my legs and spent the next week in a state of Victorian-novel-level suffering.

I actually sat there, spiralling: Maybe I can bribe an adult to buy it for me? No, that’s too risky. Who would be willing to face the legal consequences of providing illegal literature to a minor? A week later, I couldn’t take the longing anymore. I marched back into the shop with the unearned confidence of a black cat walking across a keyboard, and pleaded my case to the owner. I confessed that I wasn’t eighteen yet, but that I wanted Wonderland more than my next breath. I begged for an exception. I practically bared my soul.

The owner looked at me with the weary expression of a man facing the world’s most earnest idiot. He sighed and explained the fundamental truth that would change my life forever: “Kid, you can buy whatever you want. I don’t really care. In fact, nobody does.”

The world tilted on its axis. Wait… I can read ANYTHING? There are no rules? No laws? No limitations? The “Reading Demon” had just been handed the keys to the entire kingdom.

And oh, did I love that book. I still do, though I read it with different eyes now. Every so often, I pull it off the shelf, my little trophy of the day I unlocked the full potential of life, and I just bask in its beauty.

Because Wonderland wasn’t just my awakening to deeper, messier, more “adult” topics; it was the moment I realised that… Italians can write books?!

In my narrow, naive little brain, I truly believed that only the British and my own countrymen held the patent on literature. I thought storytelling was a two-nation monopoly and everyone else was just… what? Doing chores? It was an absolute, 24-carat brain-melting moment. If Italians were allowed to write, then everyone was. Every culture, every nation, every corner of the map was producing “paper gold” and I had been sitting there like a fool, satisfied with my tiny corner of the world.

Yes, as established, I was an incredibly idiotic child. It’s fine; I’ve made my peace with it.

From that point on, the “Reading Demon” went global. I stopped sipping and started inhaling everything I could get my hands on. Then, I discovered Goodreads, and the universe didn’t just open, it exploded. I was no longer a parched donkey in a small desert; I was at the edge of an infinite ocean, and I intended to drink it dry.

Through that digital gateway, I discovered the writers who would eventually become my new gods – Murakami, Márquez, Bukowski, and the Fitzgeralds. Of course, the “no rules” epiphany was a double-edged sword. That same gateway exposed me to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, proving that while the library doors were now wide open, not everything behind them was “paper gold”. I’m gonna be honest: it wasn’t all a masterpiece.

But that was the beauty of it. My “Reading Demon” finally had the freedom to be both a scholar and a trash-compacting consumer. I had traded my rigid boxes and invisible laws for a messy, beautiful, global buffet. I was no longer waiting for permission from the “Gods of the Library” to tell me what was worthy. I was just a donkey at the oasis, and for the first time, the water was infinite.

The Great Economic Car Crash

If my childhood was a “Gold Rush” of literature, my early twenties were the Great Depression. The culprit? An Economics degree.

There is a specific kind of soul-crushing irony in spending years studying the “efficient allocation of resources” while your own mental resources are being depleted to the point of bankruptcy. My early to mid twenties saw the Reading Demon fully comatose.

When you spend your entire day inhaling textbooks on macroeconomics, staring at supply-and-demand curves until they look like spiderwebs, and memorising the intricacies of fiscal policy, the last thing you want to do at night is look at a page of prose. My brain had reached its point of diminishing returns. Books, which used to be my oxygen, started feeling like extra-credit assignments I hadn’t asked for.

I’d look at my bookshelf, the one filled with the “Gods” I’d discovered at sixteen, and feel nothing but a dull, heavy guilt. My library became a graveyard of “To-Be-Read” piles that gathered dust while I crunched numbers and analysed market trends. I was an Economics graduate who was intellectually rich but narratively starved. I had forgotten how to read for the simple, “unhinged” joy of it.

I wasn’t a parched donkey anymore; I was a donkey that had been forced to drink nothing but salt water for five years straight. I was bloated and tired, and I thought the magic was gone for good.

The Munich CPR attempt

The “Great Depression” of my reading life didn’t end with a quiet moment of reflection or a New Year’s resolution. It did get kick-started by a logistical nightmare at the Munich airport.

There I was, caught in the middle of a massive airport strike. The boards were red, the lounges were overflowing with frustrated travellers, and the air was thick with that specific brand of “airport despair”. I was stuck. No spreadsheets, just hours of empty time stretching out like a desert before me.

My phone battery was a ticking time bomb. In an act of pure survival, I wandered into an airport bookstore.

I didn’t look for the “Gods” of literature. I didn’t look for anything that would make me smarter. I just wanted a life raft. I picked up a book, sat on my suitcase amidst the chaos of cancelled flights, and started to read.

As I turned the pages, the noise of the Munich terminal faded. The stress of the strike, the burnout of the last six years, and the ghost of my Economics degree all evaporated, if only for a few moments. I wasn’t an adult with a career and a flight to catch; I was seven years old on a beach again, throwing a tantrum for a story. I was nine years old on a secret balcony.

I’d love to tell you that by the time I boarded the plane, I was a Reader again, that The Demon was awake and ready to feast. But that’s a lie. In reality, The Demon barely managed a rhythmic blip on the monitor; a brief, shivering sign of life before it settled back into its coma juices. It stayed there for years, stewing. I spent that time in a cycle of half-starts: picking up a book, struggling through a few chapters, and abandoning it to the shelf. It took a long, slow crawl through that wasteland before I finally reclaimed that frantic, youthful thirst.

The Spite-Fueled Resuscitation

That is to say: Munich was just a teaser trailer. The real resurrection of the Reading Demon wasn’t born out of airport boredom; it was forged in the fires of bureaucratic rage.

The catalyst? Amazon. In a single, cursed month, they managed to lose three of my orders in a row. When I contacted customer support, they were…not helpful, to say the least. They were a void of indifference. I sat there, vibrating with a very specific kind of anger: the “8-year-old walking back to school for more math” kind of anger. You want to deny me my purchases? FINE, have at it.

In a move of sheer, petty rebellion, I marched over to a local competitor and bought an e-reader. Now, let’s be clear: I am fully aware of how little sense this made. The device I bought was still a Kindle. I didn’t switch brands; I just switched middlemen. But in that moment, buying it from the “enemy’s” rival felt like a tactical masterstroke. I wasn’t just buying a device; I was declaring war on the logistics of my own life. Grrrrrr.

To add even more fuel to my fire of irrationality: the lost Amazon orders that triggered this collapse weren’t even books. They were bottles of nail polish. But in my mind, a strike against my manicures was a strike against my soul.

The spite-fueled purchase worked better than any therapy. It was the high-speed pump that the “parched donkey” needed to finally drink again. The Demon was officially out of its coma, but after six years of spreadsheets, it had no idea what it wanted to drink. I was a digital revolutionary with no mission.

So, I did what my sixteen-year-old self would do: I went to Goodreads. I dug. And I dug. And I dug some more until I hit paydirt: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.

I don’t know if Bennett pours literal crack into his ink, but his books are terrifyingly addictive. I went down a rabbit hole so deep that I had to physically resurface every few chapters just to loudly yap at my partner about how incredible it was, aggressively trying to recruit him into my new obsession. I was fully immersed.

Since that fateful Saturday morning when I first met Din and Ana Dolabra, the engine hasn’t stopped. I’ve been on a tear, reading two to three hours every single day. Aside from the mandatory period of “emotional recovery” I had to take after devouring Alchemized, I am back to my youthful prowess.

The coma is over. The “Reading Demon” is no longer a ghost in an Economics textbook. It’s alive, it’s digital, and it’s as hungry as Mrs Pacman.

Looking back, the “Reading Demon” hasn’t really changed much since that first beach tantrum. It’s still greedy, it’s still irrational, and it still treats every new book like the last bottle of water in a vast, dry desert. Whether I’m hiding on a secret balcony at age nine or yapping at my partner about magical detectives in my thirties, the core of the obsession remains the same: I don’t just want to read; I want to eat that book up.

My Economics degree tried its best to tax my imagination into oblivion. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my math-homework-demanding, rule-following, spite-buying self, it’s that the Demon is remarkably hard to kill.

Today, my library is a chaotic, digital buffet. There are no “Gods of the Library” giving me permission, and there are no more invisible rules about what a “grown-up” should read. I’ll go from a Hugo Prize winner to a trashy romance to a “crack-filled” fantasy novel without blinking an eye.

I’m finally at peace with the fact that I am, and always will be, a parched donkey. But as long as I have my spite-bought Kindle and an endless TBR list, I’m okay with that. The desert of life is a lot less daunting when you have enough stories to gulp up.

The coma is over. The lights are on.