My Favorite Memories Of My Reading : My Love Of Reading

Thanks to hours and hours of bedtime stories, I was able to read from the age of 3. In kindergarten I read to my classmates, and by second grade I was reading series like The Boxcar Children and Trixie Belden. Books allowed me to get lost in other worlds full of adventure and excitement. My love for what words can do has extended through high school. I pride myself on my book collection, anything from Hunger Games to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ve continued to read all the way through high school, some books four or five times because I love them so much.

As a kid, I was always really shy and spent much of my free time reading books. In 4th grade, the teacher required that each month we read a certain amount of short stories or books and write a summary for each. I always completed the minimum requirement and read plenty extra books. Throughout the year, I always had the most stars next to my name for top reader, not because I wanted to collect as many gold stars as I could, but because I really enjoyed reading. I had my eyes glued to a book even when I was at home. I

I would check out books simply because we were told to, not because I was actually going to read and enjoy them. My interest in reading died down completely. It wasn’t that reading was difficult for me, I was just lazy and didn’t want to read. My STAR Reading test scores also started to go down hill. I never got a bad score, but I stopped getting the advanced scores that I used to get before. In middle school, we started to really focus on writing papers, which before, I felt that writing was my strong suit in English class because I have always had teachers tell me that I excelled at writing. I felt that way until I failed a paper we were assigned to write in 7th grade. I don’t remember much about the paper because I’ve tried to push it out of my memory as best as I could, but what I do remember is, it was a persuasive essay and apparently I didn’t do an amazing job at persuading my teacher it was good enough. Since failing what I thought was an essay deserving of an A, I became discouraged and uniterested in

I have always loved reading due to the exciting stories and the interesting characters that provide a good backbone. All my early books I remember as feel good tales to make the young reader fall in love with the characters while usually having a central theme to teach. Some of the charm of these books was how it got the reader engaged and taught along the way. Just like children shows such as Sesame Street the books where entertaining and also educational so it gave children a early start for school; I would be excited whenever the teacher would teach something and you would already know the new word or

As I look back on my childhood, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fond of reading. I love the way a good book just draws you in and it is almost impossible to set it down because you want to know what happens next! Looking back to my earliest moments I can always remember my mom and grandma always reading me books for hours and hours at a time. My favorite saying when I was younger was, “just read one more!” I couldn’t go to sleep without my mom at least reading me five books! My favorite was “The Little Mermaid” but I loved all of the princess books and I had possibly every one you could think of!

Most of what I can remember from my childhood is being read to by my mom and her teaching me how to read, alongside my older sister. During the day all that I wanted to do was have my mom read to me, so she would. And every night before I went to bed she would let me pick one book for her to read to me. It was my favorite part of everyday. It wasn’t just at home that people would read to me, my grandma would too whenever we went to her house. She had this book full of short stories that always had a good lesson at the end. I loved hearing my grandma’s soothing voice right before I fell asleep. My favorite book was “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” by Dr. Seuss. Since my mom read it to me at least once everyday, I began to memorize it. I wasn’t actually reading the words on the page, I just knew the story so well that I could recite it.

As a six-month-old baby books had opened up a whole entire new world of experience for me. My inspiration to learn how to read and write was encouraged by my Mother and Grandmother. This is because they read out loud to me before bed occasionally and gave me the best time of my life by introducing me to a library. By two years of age I developed speech and other communication skills. This helped me understand and develop a favorite book, “PJ Funny Bunny,” and I would stare at the pages pretending I was reading them. I would continually pretend to read with other Dr. Seuss books, Smurf pop-up books (I imagined I was a part of these for hours), sniff & scratches, and sensory books. I had just begun

When I was a child I loved being read to, it was my absolute favorite. My mom likes to remind me that I would often pull a book from the shelf and take it to the nearest person for an impromptu story time. I was about four when I shut down another kid for interrupting story time by asking him: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” Once I learned

Some of my earliest memories are those of my mother and grandmother reading stories to me before bed. At three and four years old I loved the stories they would read. Being introduced to Dr. Seuss and Curious George instilled a love for these fictional worlds where strange and silly things happened. I read constantly during elementary school on into early high school where I began to fall in love with biographies and historical nonfiction. During this time I also began my complicated journey of learning to write. Writing was not as easy for me to enjoy, but eventually, I did find some joy in it. There were many things which happened between the age of 4 and 19 that made me the literate person I am today.

Ever since I was little I’ve loved stories and reading. Something about reading was so wonderful, just being able to get lost in a story and letting your imagination run wild. I have many amazing memories of different stories and books. Everything from fairytales and folklore from around the world to Animal Farm. I’ve read a variety of different books.

Reading in school and at home began to seem more like a menial task that had to be seen through to completion due to the wishes of my superiors. Due to the boyish nature of my personality, I wanted to go outside and play games, not sit inside and read quietly. Then, while I was playing soccer during recess at school, I dove for the ball and heard a cracking sound. I had broken my arm. Immediately, my parents were summoned to school and I went to the hospital to get a cast. Devastation struck me as the doctor proclaimed that I was not going to play sports until the cast came off. During the first few days wearing the cast, I tended to sit around and wallow in self-pity. Then, I realized that, if I was not allowed to enjoy myself, I might as well do something productive. So, I picked up the book nearest me, which happened to be Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief. I was dreading the hours of boredom I was about to face. However, as I began to read, I realized that reading was more enjoyable than simply running around. When I read, I was transformed into a new character every time. Each book allowed me to experience a new lifestyle. No other form of entertainment was quite as thrilling. Over the summer, my cast came off, but, due to the wonderful novels I read while my cast was still on, I maintained a lifelong love of reading new

Reading has been one of my favorite hobbies since I was a little child. I grew up as a normal child should grow and eventually I had to start learning for me to fit in society. My literacy started many years ago, after I knew how to talk and communicate with people. Reading my alphabet was quite stressful and I had to be given a hand by my family members. I remember my parents reading with me and it was the most meaningful and memorable way to spend time with me. This is because I liked reading a lot and I was eager to learn so that I could fit in with my older siblings. My favorite books were storybooks taking about adventures and fairytales

My furthest memory of learning how to read was when my classmates and I were all sitting crisscross applesauce on the giant, colorful rug in our library. Our librarian, Mrs. Cash, would read us Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Kids, one of my favorite series of books as I was growing up, and would read it very slow to us so we could understand and showed us all of the pretty pictures. After she read to us, we were each allowed to pick out a book and go to the little tables and attempt to read it. I can remember hearing each student sounding words out and laughing at the pictures and it was a genuinely fun experience. Throughout elementary school, going to the library was one of the most fun things to do. I loved when we would have little competitions to see who could read the most books and receive the most Accelerated Reader (AR) points. Most of the time, the one who had the most points every six weeks, in each grade level (Pre-Kindergarten-5th), would receive a pizza and popcorn party which was always a pleasurable way to reward us. Overall, my elementary experience was highly fascinating.

The more I was being forced to read, the less time I spent reading for enjoyment, until eventually I no longer spent any of my free time with a novel in hand. Reading became a chore; it became boring. Sometimes the simple act of being forced to do something makes you despise it. As a child, I enjoyed several different genres of novels and many different topics intrigued me, so it wasn’t necessarily what I was reading that disinterested me. One required novel I remember reading was The Outsiders in seventh grade. This was a type of book I feel I would normally enjoy because of the mystery and action; however, I couldn’t bring myself to truly become engaged in this novel. Reason being-it was a forced act, with multiple worksheets and homework to accompany the reading. Fast forward to high school when I’m reading my required lengths in an anatomy and physiology textbook. Science has always been an interest of mine; in fact, I’m now majoring in Human Physiology. Yet reading this text wasn’t something I enjoyed. Again, because it felt forced; it was not something I was doing simply out of interest. This is how I continue to feel about most of the reading I do today as a college student.

The beginning of my interest in reading goes way back, although I don’t have any defining “aha!” moment, where I all of a sudden enjoyed reading books. There were always books around when I was growing up, if I was at my grandparents house it was the books they kept from their youth; classics like Treasure Island or any Hemingway book, the hard covers permanently infused with dust; plenty of History books, particularly World War II history; and the children’s books I always received as presents when I visited. My mom also read a lot, but more modern books, like supernatural or light horror books, nothing too difficult (or scary). I spent a lot of time reading magazines, mostly Video Game (note: spent more time creating stories off the