The Importance Of Reading Frederick Douglass

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free,” wrote Fredrick Douglass. Not only is this true to me but it is also inspirational. The means to learn, understand the world around you, or even communicate would not be possible if you couldn’t read. Reading opens up so many opportunities for everybody that learns to do it. Once you learn to read you have the means to succeed. That is why I am grateful for my parents who started reading and singing nursery rhymes to me at a very young age. When I was a child, my parents showered me with nursery rhymes like “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” Then fairy tales like “The Three Little Pigs.” What stuck with me the most were books like The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. I loved when my parents would read books like those to me before bed. They would fill my dreams with colorful movie-like images of what this cat could possibly do next. After my mother would read me a story sometimes I would even use my imagination and act out the images that the story had given me. At this time in my life I would even beg my mom to find time to read to me during the day, and she would. She would even teach me to sound out the

I remember my sixth grade English teacher reading us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling. I fell in love with that series and read almost all of them. The time when my feelings about reading went sour was when we were made to read certain books in school. I didn’t have any interest in reading Animal Farm by George Orwell or poems like Beowulf by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet. That took the thrill of reading away from me. I started to read less and less in my free time because I had to read other books for good grades. I started reading more things like magazines or reptile books with lots of pictures. The words of a book became less appealing, and I pretty much stopped reading for pleasure all