Student battles boredom with war stories

As the weekly hunt for activities around the house continues, many of us are still left empty-handed and bored. I managed to find refuge this week in books.

It seems like a rather obvious solution to boredom, but in a modern era, where one can simply go on the internet and find many quicker alternatives to kill time, it can be hard to find reading entertaining.

While I was sitting at my desk, I had to go back and check one of my reference books, when I stumbled across a pile of unread memoirs from both the First and Second World Wars. These are books that I had bought, expecting to read, but wound up untouched due to favorable online research.

Picking through them, I was able to find a book that held my interest, “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger. It is a gritty war memoir that reads like a historical fiction. There are so many stories that it almost feels unreal. I was vigorously flipping through every page until I was done. It took me almost three days and was a very good read. 

I still have many, many books that I have yet to get through. I’ve also been considering switching them to a verbal format just for efficiency. Most books are also available in audio format, on Amazon, YouTube and other sites.

Even just to find a research book has been beneficial for me. If the book relates to a topic that I enjoy, it becomes so much easier to read. I also managed to get through hundreds of pages worth of research material that I otherwise would have never learned from because of how reliant I was on the digital world.

While our computers and smartphones offer us a world of information to a myriad of topics, there is still information and research missing.

Being in quarantine and finally picking up old books again has taught me that the internet is not always the first place to look when I need a question answered, or a good, healthy source of entertainment.

I believe that reading, whether it be an audiobook, or a physical book, is a good way to spend your time during quarantine. It can be very relaxing to ignore the fast-moving outside world and get lost in a story.