*~*Reading*~*

I was about five years old when I started reading. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because my parents and family members and teacher were just so happy that I could read. So for most of my life I have enjoyed to read. Growing up, I read tons of books. How to Eat Fried Worms, The Boxcar Children, The Babysitters’ Club, Junie B. Jones, and The Princess Diaries; these books were all among my list of books to read growing up. Then I got a little older and read a lot of fictional books by African-American authors. The only time I really read a legit piece of literature was when one of my teachers forced me to do so. As I got older I really did not enjoy reading unless it was something that I had picked for myself. All the books that my middle school teachers, and some high school teachers, assigned just seemed so boring and irrelevant. All that changed my junior year of high school. Allison Bird was my English teacher and she said that her sole purpose in life was to teach students how to get the most of what you read and to love what you read. Mrs. Bird was completely against trash novels. She referred to these books as “mind-candy” and “any student with an intellectual mind was too good to read such trash” she would say. Mrs. Bird would assign us books that had so much meaning to them. We would learn so much about people and life as well as different literary terms. My favorite novel that we read in her class was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It was a fictional novel that took you along the span of two young boys’ lives together in a small town in Connecticut. So after completing her class I had developed a greater appreciation for literature and I really did not have the desire to read anything without substance. The rest of that year I read more than I have probably ever read in a period time. I would read before I went to bed, whenever I was traveling, getting my hair done, and basically just any and every time that I would be sitting idle. I would get so involved in whatever book I was reading that a lot of times it was hard for me to just stop reading it so I would finish a book in like a day or two. I get the most out of what I read when I can just sit down and completely focus on what I’m reading. Lately I have been reading a lot of non-fictional books and some books that are classified as classic literature. I think I enjoy those books the most because I gain so much from them. The non-fictional books that I read are always like self-empowering books and the fictional literature books I have read lately all have to do with the main character growing in more ways than one. I like books like these because it really feeds into what I want out my own life and they allow me to view different situations in ways that I had never thought of.