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Personal Narrative: My Reading

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I used to be a super reader. I clearly remember snowy days in the winter that allowed me to stay inside the entire day, reading. I remember on one of those days that I was able to finish an entire book in that day. Start to finish, from eight AM to five PM, I read the entire thing. However, I was young, and the book I was reading (which I cannot remember now) was probably not that difficult. I remember reading the first book in the Harry Potter series entirely in the car on a summer road trip. An anomaly, according to my mother, as I was the only one she knew who could read in the car without getting carsick. I used to love to read, and this was something that I have given up in recent years.
In middle school, I would say that my reading began …show more content…

I tried Sherlock Holmes, Cloud Atlas, Catch 22, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This is where my reading truly stopped. I started reading not to enjoy books, and enjoy the worlds that they create, but to step into the ring and practically fight the book as I read. I continued to hate reading at home, and as it got harder in the classroom, my reading really began to dwindle.
I began buying books and never finishing them, sometimes never even starting them. Why even bother if the book was just wasted money? To answer this question, I would say that I enjoyed the thought of becoming a die-hard reader again. I went to Barnes and Noble and bought books because I thought that type of person was someone who I wanted to be. I thought it was cool for someone to sit at home all day, reading for four hours straight. And that’s something that most of my teenage classmates today don’t think, and as a result have also abandoned reading after a childhood of being a …show more content…

I do not read to challenge myself--that’s what school is for. In English class I can choose the eighteenth-century excerpt and think critically about it. At home, I do not need to continue this. At home, I can read books that are for pure enjoyment. Easy reads that make you feel accomplished whenever you read. Not a book that has language so intricate and text so small that it takes thirty minutes to read five pages. I prefer books that I can breeze through, and like I have recently done, finish it all in three days. This confidence in reading--the fact that “I like to read, and I am good at it”-- will lead to the classroom when it’s time for a close reading exercise. The confidence will drive students to enjoy the hard content and not despise

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