The Importance of Reading
My Experience as a Reader
Growing up, I have very vague memories of being read to as a child. The little flashes of memory that I do have are of my dad enthusiastically reading Dr. Seuss books to me. It was never really something I remember being too concerned with or begging my parents to do. I mostly remember wanting to be able to read myself, and once I could I would grab any book that looked interesting to me from the school library. I read a lot of Shel Silverstein and Goosebumps back then.
As a student, I have always wanted to have a very clear understanding of my schoolwork. Sometimes that means I will read a text over and over again until I get it. Sometimes it’s because I misread it the first time and got my words mixed up or turned words into different words that weren’t actually there. It has made me wonder if I am dyslexic or something of that nature but it has never been enough of an issue for me to try to find out. I am very well aware that I do have the problem of being a procrastinator though. Occasionally that causes me to try to skim through a text as fast as I can in search of whatever answers I’m in need of, but I usually have to go back through and reread the whole thing so that never works out well.
As previously mentioned, I have always wanted to have a very clear understanding of my school work. That being said, I feel being well read and having good reading comprehension was extremely imperative in middle and high school and will continue to be so in college. Not only will it help me understand whatever subject that I am studying better, but it will also assist in the quality in which I write my papers, and all of that has a direct effect on a person’s grade. One could even say that a person’s reading comprehension skills and experience could have a direct effect on whether a person even graduates from TNCC or transfers to the college or university of their dreams.
I don’t do as much reading as I used to. I try every once in a while to pick up a good book and get lost in it the way I did before. I would read so much in high school that I would get in trouble for it. I have fond memories of my English teacher yelling at me in the middle of class to put my book down. Actually it was terrifying because I was extremely shy and anything that caused a whole classroom of people to turn around and stare at me was a nightmare. Back then I was obsessed with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera”. I also dove into things like Dante’s “The Inferno” and went nuts over the comparisons I found between the levels of hell and the levels below the opera house. Gaston Leroux’s Phantom literally lived in what was described as hell in “The Inferno”, It blew my mind! I wish I could still get that excited about reading books. Now the only thing I read obsessively are recipes books because that's how much I love food. However I can’t say I’ve ever been Interested in using an audio book. I feel like it would take away the best part of reading. Reading a book yourself and getting lost in your mind can be a whirlwind of fun in itself.
