Personal Narrative: My Love For Reading

At the age of four I learned to read, and from then I became an avid reader. I fell in love with Dick and Jane, Biscuit, and all books by Dr. Seuss. I begged my mom to take me to book stores every weekend. This passion for reading continued through the years of Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody, that was until I reached middle school. Middle school was the beginning of long textbooks and the curriculum that forced you to read and interpret books in their way. At that moment my love for reading disappeared, I didn’t like being told that I had to read a science fiction novel like House of the Scorpion or interpret The Outsiders in the way that I did. Literary classes picked apart the story so much you were unable to imagine the characters and the

In my AP classes I learn most of the material on my own by reading textbooks or articles. Reading a large amount every night was a requirement to even come close to succeeding in these classes. Due to the quantity of material I was forced to read, I, unfortunately, found myself mesmerized on the amount of pages I had to consume rather than the content of what I was reading. Therefore, it led me to skimming and not reading as thoroughly as I should have. As I’ve gotten older literary information has been continuously shoved at me, causing reading to become a chore instead of an opportunity to be transported into an adventure like spending the day with The Cat in the Hat when I was younger. My biggest obstacle with reading is how to continue to find joy in the fictional stories I loved growing up, while I’m being forced to read about other people’s lives, how a government functions, and the origins of civilizations millions of years ago. I still enjoy reading, but I read in a much more limited sense than I did when I was younger. I’m no longer able to read consistently; I read when school is on break. I’m also not able to read the type of literature I enjoy because of the work load in my classes. I love reading material that I pick out and choose to read on my own free will like the Hundred Oaks series by Miranda Kenneally, The Hunger Games by