Mr. Sullivan's English III students:

Our Literacy Autobiographies


Memories of Reading

When I was younger I loved to read. Everynight I would retire to my bedroom and read my favorite books by all different authors. I have this very vivid memory of myself reading a book of famous ballets with illustrations of the dancers on stage in their costumes. As I read I would imagine myself on stage as the prima ballerina in a beautiful, elaborate tutu, twirling across the stage being dipped by my prince charming. When my friends would come over, I would tell them of my wonderful ballets that I had read. We then would dress up and dance around my house as if no one in the world was as great a dancer as we were.

Also when I was a young girl I would act out the books I was reading. I remember reading a book about a girl who wanted to play Peter Pan in a play at her school. The girl was taunted by the boys because they said a girl could not play Peter Pan. At the end of the book, the girl recieved the part and performed wonderfully in the production. After I read the book, I was always watching the animated version of the movie and would jump from chairs pretending I could fly. I would pretend I had to audition for a role in Peter Pan and everynight would prepare for my "big audition."When another person wanted their turn at pretending to be Peter Pan, I would then play Tiger Lily the ruler of all the Indians in Never-ever Land. Another favorite book of mine was Hansel and Gretel. I would steal bread from the kitchen and make a trail for me to find my way back to safety from the witch with. My mother was not very happy when she found bread crumbs sprinkled throughout our house.

Reading as a young girl would allow myself to explore my imagination. The enjoyment I recieved from reading made me so happy. Unfortunatley as the years have gone by and as I have gotten older, my time for reading has strongly diminished. I really miss the fire I once had for reading. As I have gotten older, the privleges and responsibilites I have earned have come with a great price. The price is that my imagination has not been able to explore the wonderful world of reading as it once did. Hopefully, in the years to come I will gain back my once strong passion for reading and with that, freedom for my imagination. 


"Mr. Bell could fix almost anything. Broken locks, broken clocks, broken pans, broken fans, broken plates, broken skates- he could fix them all". My favorite story as a young child was Mr. Bell's Fixit Shop. It was about an elderly man who owned a shop and fixed everything except broken hearts. One day a young girl went into the shop and was very upset: her grandmother's dog had chewed up her favorite doll and her doll was ruined. Mr. Bell fixed up her doll and gave it to her the following day. The girl was very happy and she told Mr. Bell that he could fix everything, even broken hearts, because he fixed hers.

I remember going to bed at night and having my mother or my father lying beside me in my bed and reading to me, Mr. Bell's Fixit Shop. The soothing voices that they used could put any child to sleep but not me, they would read me the book every night and I would fall asleep right after they finished. I would never fall asleep while they were reading. I remember trying so hard to sound out the words, and thinking it was the hardest thing in the world to do at the time. Struggling to sound out words like "sign" and "little". Words that come so easy now but were so difficult then. I remember my parents being so patient with me yet so eager for me to be able to do it by myself. I read every night for many nights, trying to read different books and different levels. I admit it took me a while, but I never gave up (or at least that's what my parents tell me). I also remember the day that I was able to go through reading Mr. Bell's Fixit Shop without asking for help, the happiness that filled the household was incredible. My parents were ecstatic and I was very proud of myself. But till this day I still don't know if I actually were able to read the whole book by myself or if I just memorized it word for word because of its repetition. Still, it was a big accomplishment in my life and without the help of my favorite story, Mr. Bell's Fixit Shop, I don't think I would of been able to learn how to read.


My Experience with Books

Practically my whole life I have loved to read. I have a book case with around two to three hundred books in it, and that all from the last four years. I have changed reading genres many times as I've grown older. As I've read more and more books, my reading speed has increased. I've gone from the just learning how to read speed up to around forty to fifty words per minute. This has come from extensive exposure to books and from doing puzzles. Doing puzzles helps in reading because you are exercising the mind and fitting pieces together.

The earliest that I can remember reading a book was the children's books, the "Bernstein Bears". It was about a family of bears who lived in a tree as a house. All of the books had morals to them like do not litter and eat healthy. I used to sit on my floor for hours and just read those books. After the "Bernstein Bears" books, I moved onto the "Goosebumbs" series. The Goosebumps series was really interesting and a fun read. I read around thirty to forty of these books until I got tired of them.

As I progressed through elementary school, I was required to do book reports and I had to find some books that were not the Bernstein Bears or Goosebumps. That was when I found the "Hardy Boys" mystery stories. The "Hardy Boys" was interesting for a little while. I read the "Hardy Boy's" books for about half of the school year but then they had grown old so I moved on. At this point there was a card game out called "Magic: The Gathering" which was really popular. I got into the books but only read the first four or five books. The card game faded quickly and so did my interest in the books.

I went through a period now where I really did not read any books at all. I was just beginning my computer infatuation and completely forgot about my love of books. I went with my computer fling until around sixth grade where I became a "Star Wars" freak. I watched the movies all the time and started to read the books that were published about the events that happened after the movies. I read all twenty-five to thirty books that were out and I still do read them. The thing that I really enjoyed about the Star Wars books was the ship fights in space.

The Star Wars sagas were the books that catapulted me into the love of reading that I have today. It introduced to me the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre of reading. I soon found two authors that I absolutely loved, and since I found them I have read close to every book they have published. The author of one of my favorite series is Orson Scott Card who wrote the Ender saga. The Ender saga tells about humanity in the future where we have lost two wars to an alien race and the next one would defeat us. In order to counter the danger, the world government breeds children that are super smart in military intelligence and are put through a command school. Ender Wiggin was the most prominent of these students and the one most likely to succeeded and save humanity. The Ender saga tells of Ender's life from beginning to end and all of the tragedies that he faces. Orson Scott Card also wrote several other series which I have read and love. If I had to recommend an author to anyone, I would recommend Orson Scott Card or R.A. Salvatore to them.

R.A. Salvatore writes fantasy novels about tales that happen in worlds that have elves, goblins, wizards and warriors. R.A. Salvatore is the author of my all time favorite saga of all time. It is set in the Forgotten Realms where magic and monsters rule. It is a tale of a dark elf named Drizzt Do'Urden who rejects his heritage as a dark elf and leaves the Underdark to live on the surface. On the surface he is only met with hostility and hatred until he finds a small group of people who become his closest friends and companions for life. It is a fourteen book saga, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good read.

Throughout my life so far, I have developed a wide taste for books, but I have settled on the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre as my favorite. People always ask me what is so great about science fiction books and why I always read them. I just tell those people that I love to live in a world of the mind. These books help to take me away from the problems of my life on Earth and put me in the much more enjoyable problems of the Forgotten Realms or wherever else that I may go. Books are my release from the real world, and I would give someone a book if they were looking for a release from life.


 My family has had a love of books for as long as I can remember. Before I could even talk, my mother would read her books aloud so I would become familiar with tone and the flow of words. Weather it actually helped or not, I have no idea. As a young girl of about five years, I would continuously demand my mom read me those children's' books with the cardboard pages. In fact, I listened to those stories so often that I no longer needed for them to be read to me since I had memorised what was on each page. This really baffled the baby sitters when they thought I was reading at such a young age! I soon decited I had enough of "reading" other peoples' books and that I was going to "write" my own. The adventures of spot are very inspirational to a five-year old. I would sit next to my mom and dictate stories to her sentence by sentence. I'm sure all the books I made were edge of your seat thrillers.

In school, my writing always seemed to be of equal quality as my classmates. During written tests, I usually am the last one to finish. This is probably because I spend most of my time thinking of a clever response that will be different from the rest. I absolutely hate using examples or points which were brought up in class. However, this can work to my disadvantage, leaving me groping for ideas.

One weakness I have is conveying my thoughts into structured sentences. I can remember times when I was excited about a great point and frantically jotted down my thoughts in the best way I could think to explain them. My excitement would only turn to frustration after the papers were handed back and mine seemed to be decorated with red question marks. However, I think I am getting better at that. Recently, when I have a point or a spur of the moment idea I jot down words and phrases on a separate piece of paper where they can be organised and put into terms others canunderstand.

I think that practice makes perfect. That is why I am confident that with all the reading and writing I will be doing this year I will grow as an English student. I can make improvements on my own work through reading the work of others. If I keep an open mind I can let the ideas of others influence me to become a better, more creative writer.


As far back as I can remember, I have loved to read. My oldest memory of reading is of me begging my mother to read me my favorite childhood book, Junk Day On Juniper Street, when I was about five. While this is my oldest memory, if I look through old family albums there are pictures of my mother reading to my brother and a three year old me. I was always the one wanting to act out what was being read.

My brother had a lot to do with me learning to read. When he began learning, so did I. The books that my mother used to help my brother and I to read were of old folk tales. My mother would read the story to us and there were blanks in the sentences where we had to fill in the words. As soon as I learned how to read by myself, I did not want people reading to me; it was easier for me to imagine what was going on in the story when I was reading it myself.

The odd thing is that, though my memories about reading at home go very far back, my memories of reading in school only go as far back as third grade. In third and fourth grade we started to read actual books, books by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. Between these two years I read an uncountable number of books. My friends and I even started something we called the "locker library" where we kept books in our locker . When people wanted to read one, we would write down their name, the book they took and let them take it home to read. Our most popular books were our Goosbumps books, which even though I never really got into, started me on my horror book phase. By the end of fourth and the beginning of fifth grade, I had a fascination with horror and mystery stories. The adventure in these books seemed so exciting to me, I've always loved adventure in stories.

In sixth grade I switched from public school to a small private day school. Unfortunately, when I switched homework took up so much of my time that I rarely had a chance to read books I enjoyed. In sixth grade English we read many historical books which were hard to understand and boring to me. In seventh grade we read A Midsummer Nights Dream by Shakespeare. When I read it, I didn't understand much of it. Luckily, the school was putting on a seventies version of the play at the same time. Reading it and then seeing it on stage made me understand and enjoy the play so much more. The same thing happened in eighth grade. My class read The Crucible and then at the end of the trimester the school put on the play. Once again reading the book made the play much more enjoyable. Eighth grade was also the first year where I read a book for school that I actually wanted to read. It turned out being one of the best books I've ever read and one of the few that ever made me cry. It was called Briar Rose and is now under my list of favorite books of all time.

Unfortunately, the older I get the less time I have to read. I read for school, but it's not the same. In the summer I'll read one or two non-required books; I have gotten into bad the habit of reading a book which a movie has been based on, before going to see the movie. Even though I tend to do this a lot, I don't recommend it. The Beach was a book that I loved, but the movie was pathetic and thoroughly disappointed me. Reading has played a large part in my life and I hope that I will be able to keep reading books that I enjoy.


When I Began to Read

I sat at my desk as my teacher wrote out on a large pad of paper a few words. The words at first came easy, dog, cat, then as the list went on they got longer, and harder. I remember our teacher helping us to sound out the words we had difficulty with. We learned as a class how to read words and struggled as a class to figure out some others. I knew that one day I would be able to read through the list of words with no trouble. Reading a few words at a time got easier and I, along with my class, started to progress to short books.

This was when we were asked to read aloud in class. I had more trouble with this aspect of reading. When I was younger I had speech problems, so when reading aloud, I lacked a certain confidence other kids had. I would often stumble over words and not be able to pronounce them correctly. As I got older my fear of reading aloud diminished, and I was able to read when asked.

One of the first books I read was Where is Spot?. I flipped through the book and found a certain joy in reading about the big yellow dog. The book was like a game to me, I had to try my best to read and find out what the big yellow dog was up to. After I got tired of trying to find Spot, I moved on to "Good night Moon." My mother had been reading that book to me since I was young and now it was my turn to give it a try. The first couple of times I never got through the book before my bedtime. I would try to convince my mother I did not need sleep, I wanted to get to the end of the book. As time passed, I finally was able to read through the whole book. I had become more fluid and had begun to string my words together as sentences, instead of single words. I soon got tired of "Good night Moon" and moved on to Clifford stories.

As the years went on I got hooked on the Boxcar Children. I found these books to be very interesting, and at that age I loved a good mystery. These books were challenging, yet not too much that I could not understand them. I read each and every book of the series and some over again. After I had read all of the series, I moved on to the Hardy Boys. Yet again I picked a series having to do with mysteries.

For a while after, I found there was no longer time to read. I had homework from school and every other moment was taken up with sports. This started occuring in sixth grade and still is true today. I put reading books on hold, something I once had liked to do. The only times I read was when I had required reading. It had been a long time since I had read a book I enjoyed. This summer when picking a book to read for my extra book was when I began to read again. "The Fountainhead" was not my first choice but was the easiest book to find. I read the beginning and was not intrigued. It took a while for me to get interested in the book but once I got interested and I got back to reading. I still had one thing working against me, but it was my fault. I had left my glasses at home and found reading the book to be a little more difficult then normal.

I began reading at an early age and read every so often. There was a time where I read every day, now I am back to that spot. I have to read every day for history or physics and other subjects, too. I am glad that I learned to read because everything in life would have been a lot more difficult had I not learned.


My Reading Journey

At first, it sounded like just a whole bunch of words coming out of my dad's mouth, but after a few months I understood most of the language and before I knew it, I was reading the book to him. I do not really recall the exact book, but it was yellow and had big pages and several large colorful drawings to accompany the readings throughout the book. When I first began to read I took small pieces of what I read and tried to make sense of what was going on before I moved forward and continued reading. During my first years of reading I basically stuck with the larger books with colorful pictures. Like most things, I eventually grew out of those types of books and went on to bigger and better things, almost like real books, but only about 50-100 pages at the most. I also grew interested with comics and began reading newspaper/ magazine ads and short articles that I found interesting and worth reading.

For quite some time when I first began reading, I was interested in the books that my sister was reading, mainly because I thought it was cool to read long books without pictures. She is two years older than me and even though I hate saying it, I looked up at her at the time just to see what she was up to. I was interested in what she was reading and how intense I thought it was. In my mind I knew somehow I would get to that point in my reading career and I was not truly eager to get there in such a rush. I took my reading slow and usually chose playing with a friend over reading all the time and would not think twice about it.

As I got older the whole reading for fun idea was not quite "cool". In the upper elementary grade levels, it was cool at the time to carry a thick book to classes because it meant you were a good reader and that you read a lot. I read a good amount but to a certain extent because after reading I usually had time for fun and games. For some reason I was never too motivated to read the book that the class was reading, so when my parents found out, they nagged me to read a little bit every night after diner or before I went to bed. When I was tired, it was very hard to read either because I fell asleep or I would go into my own world of day dreaming and not even realize that I had a book in my hand. As I grew older, reading started to become more enjoyable again as the topics I choose actually interested me somewhat. I enjoyed (and still enjoy) good mysteries, autobiographies, sports stories, fiction and others. As we speak I am still learning many things about my way of reading and I am sure it will change several more times as the years go on.


From the day that I was born my mother read to me. Even from day one I was introduced into reading and began to learn. My mother knew that reading would be an important skill to have at an early age. She knew that even exposure to reading would be a good start. This must have worked because reading has never been too difficult for me. I began reading during kindergarden which is the norm for kids I think. At first reading was hard for me because it was such a new concept for me to learn. But I soon learned how and that was how I started. I have been reading ever since

The earliest memory that is still clear in my head was when I was in sixth grade and we had to read Hemmingway's the Old Man in the Sea. I can still remember most of the details and the general concepts in the book. Personally I thought that the book was boring but that is just my opinion. Stories that only describe one character with weak minor characters make for a boring context. Back then the books that we read were pretty boring and simple with no direct themes or larger pictures. But I have to give credit where credit is due. Those books prepared me well for the larger and more challenging ones that I have to read at Suffield. And as I read these books at Suffield I am sure that they will prepare me for whatever college courses that I take that have some form of reading. From day one almost like a ladder was built, a ladder with which I continued to develop my skills in reading as I grew older. However, the best part to this ladder is that it has no end to it and limitless possibilities.


Bible Stories

My first reading experience was very early in my life. I was nearly three years old, and I could barely talk. My sister Beverly and my cousin, Ronessa, both sat with me one evening and decided that they no longer wanted to read to me before I went to bed at night. For some strange reason, although I was only two and a half, they said it was necessary for me to completely read an entire Dr. Suess book all by myself. After a night's hard work I was able to recognize my entire alphabet, and most of the three letter words I knew together. I was a proud little tike. So much pride goes into being able to read no matter how small the words.

I learned my full alphabet in a record five hours. I would be playing with my friends while reciting the alphabet and spelling the words in my limited vocabulary. The next day, I moved into learning how to sound out larger, more complicated words. My goal was to be able to read the set of bible stories my father bought for me when he heard I could read. I struggled with extremely difficult words like yak and shepherd. However, with the aide of my sister close beside me, I was able to pick my way through the first book, which was about Moses. That book was the coolest thing I had ever read. I was completely astonished when the words of the great tornado of fire jumped out of my mouth. That night was amazing.

After I was done with the first book, my cousin urged me to reading another. I think she simply wanted to keep me busy so she could talk with her friends. Either way, I was loving it and I continued on from the bible stories to Danny and the Dinosaur. To this day, that book is my favorite ever. I was baffled at how tall Danny's dinosaur is. I quickly began to day-dream about having a dinosaur of my own tied up in the backyard, riding him to and from school, and taking him out with me to friends houses. It didn't occur to me then that all that I had been reading was not true, but one thing that is true is the fact that Danny and the Dinosaur is the best series every written.


My First Reading Experience

My first reading experience occurred when I was about four years old. One day my mother came to me with a little nursery rhyme book and started reading it to me. After a few pages, she told me to try and sound out the words and to break the word into different parts. From then on, every time I would come across a word I did not know, I would look at it and sound it out. Techniques that my mother taught me from the first book I read, helped me throughout my whole reading career.

As time progressed, words in the book began to flow easier for me. I even began to read complete sentences without any mistakes. Within about a month, I was able to read the whole book by myself without any assistance. When that happened, I felt really proud of myself in which I was able to read the book with nobody around. For a four year old, I would say that is an accomplishment.

After I finished that book and was comfortable with the words, I moved on to new challenges. I began reading my first actual book which was Red Riding Hood. This book was more difficult for me but I was up for the challenge. With help and persistence, I began to do what I did with the other book which was read it by myself. I would ask for help when I would get stuck on a word, but I was getting the hang of it.

This memory sticks in my mind because, about twelve years ago I could not even say a word, and now I am reading 400 page books. I remember learning how to understand certain sentence context by just going back to the previous sentence. That tool helped me throughout my years of reading and will continue to help me. Certain things that one learns while they are young, follows them throughout there life.

Reading resembles the act of walking in a way, one must crawl before they walk, also one must read word for word before they start reading sentences. We must start off somewhere so we can get where we want to go.


Back when I was little, I would sit down in my bed with my dad and read for many hours. I would do this all the time with him right before I went to bed. I would sometimes help read, when I wanted to, and he would let me so that I got better at reading. I would read a page but would go too slow and stumble over the words, so my dad would have to take over because it was getting late. I remember when I would rush upstairs grab the book, get comfortable and wait for him to come up and read the book. My favorite books were the Hardy Boys. We would read that every night. Growing up I wish I was exactly like them. They were the coolest guys ever and were detectives as well. They had the coolest adventure ever, going off on vacations having mysteries and adventures fighting the bad guys as well as solving the case for their dad.

I remember collecting all of them when I was little. I stopped reading Hardy Boys, because I got too old and moved on to other books. I didn't have the time to read anymore with sports I played and school. I would read one and then move on to the next in order. I have like a whole book case full of Hardy Boys. When I finished a book I would beg my mom to go buy me the next one. So we would go together and I would pick like the next three books. The Hardy Boys were pretty thick books, and I thought they would take forever to read, but my dad read through them pretty quickly. I would just sit there and listen and ask questions until I got tired. I would fall asleep after awhile and my dad would just stop reading and shut the lights off for me to sleep. I did this for a long time with my dad until I started reading other books.

My favorite book was probably the first one. I was so exciting reading it because it was the very first one I read. It was called the Tower Treasure. It was about finding two bad guys and they had money hidden in a tower. I read this book five times. I haven't read in awhile and I miss the good old days lying in my bed waiting to read a Hardy Boys book before I fall asleep. Hopefully one Day I'll have that with my kid when I am a father.


The furthest back I can remember of myself actually reading was when I was in first grade, still studying in Hong Kong. I studied in one of the top all girls local school of Hong Kong. We read a great deal in language classes, both Chinese and English. Hong Kong has a different education system from the States. They have separate classes for reading, writing, public speaking, listening, and grammar. That is why students have so much pressure and exams last for about two weeks.

I still remember reading short poetic stories from textbooks for Chinese class. I also read many thin and small books, each with a few different stories for English class. Those stories were usually about one paragraph long and the content were similar. Many of them talked about a girl named Sally or Mary, a boy named Peter or Jill, and a dog named Rover. When i think of the books that i read back then, I can clearly remember many of the stories; kittens drinking milk, boys playing ball, mice stealing cheese, butcher selling meat.

I actually liked going to school when i was in grade one. I got to see my friends, and i didn't have to stay home, since nobody really had time to spend with me. Getting up in the morning when the sky was still dark to catch the school bus was awful. Every morning was the same. When I got to school, everyone had to line up in rows according to their homerooms. We would sing our school song and pray together with our school principle, Revernd Sister Mary, during morning school assemblies each day. When the bell rang, we would return to our classrooms and sit at our assigned seats waiting for the tascher to arrive. The rooms were small and the wooden desks were arranged neatly and tightly together. Each class had more than forty girls. When the teacher enters the room, the class prefect would lead the rest of us to stand up to say our greetings. We sat back down after we were given permission by the teacher.

I always sat at the corner of the last row because my last name starts with "y". All classes were very serious and none of us fooled around in front of the teacher. When class starts, we would get out our books, have our previous night's homework assignment checked, and then the tacher would begin teaching. In reading classes, we always took turns reading a sentence from then story. We were often asked to memorize the story for reading class homework. If I were unlucky the next day, I would be chosen to stand up in front of everyone during the public speaking class and I would have to recite the story that i should have had memorized.

Although I had such clear memories of the books I read, I never and still don't really enjoy reading!


Autobiography

I remember the first time when I learned to read in young age. Learning to read is like magic. It is always hard to learn something new for everyone. As I went through the difficulties, I suddenly realized that I was capable of reading. It made me to feel great amazement as well as achievement.

It was when I was five or six. My parents believe that a person gains much knowledge from reading books and newspapers. They would always bring a bunch of books home for my sister, brother and me to read.

The books had wonderful and interesting pictures with stories next to them. Since I was a young and could not read the book as well as I am right now, I only enjoyed looking at the pictures. Just by looking at the pictures, I liked to imagine and make up my own stories. I would look t the pictures over and over, and I did not get bored from it.

One day, when I was flipping the pages of the storybook, my mother came into my room. My mother noticed that I was not reading but just staring at the pictures. After this happened, my mother would come into my room before I went to sleep and read me the storybooks. When my mother was reading, she would put her finger on the words that she was reading and I would follow her finger. I remember that I really enjoyed those times. I was able to see my mother more often because she would come home earlier than she used to and I loved to listen to her voice. Although it was not easy to learn new things, I remember that those days were fun.

Time goes very quickly, when I was able to read books by myself. I realized how different the real stories are form what I had imagined. It was very interesting how a person can view something so different. I think that reading many books is a good way of learning.


As a child learning how to read was a very difficult task. When I was five and in kindergarten is when I started to learn to read. My mother was the one who pretty much taught me how. My kindergarten teacher and my first grade teachers also helped me to read in the beginning. At first my mom used magnetic letters which she made words with and would tell me the word and make me repeat it. After that she had me read the Dick and Jane books, which were the books she used to learn how to read. She read the book to me first and then I read it back. If i did not know a word I was reading, my mom would make me sound it out. If really did not get the word, then she would give me a hint on how to say the word. She had taught me before kindergarten because she did not want me to be the only child in the class not having any knowledge about reading.

My mom also had me read the Clifford books and the Spot books which were both about dogs. One of my favorite books to read was Alexander's and the No Good Horrible Very Bad Day. This book was about a boy who's day was the worst ever. Everything bad happened to him. Pretty soon I was able to read all these books by myself without any help.

When I was younger I used to love to read all those books, but as I got older I started to read bigger and more advanced books such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I loved reading those books. I would read them all the time. These two books would entertain me while I went on long trips in the car. I did many book reports on them. They were definitely a few of my favorites.

Now that I am older I have to read even bigger and harder books. I will always remember what ones I stared with and all the good books I read growing up, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach will always be my favorites.


My first experience reading was Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. My favorite book was Green Eggs and Ham. I remember being happy that the main character eventually ate the green eggs and ham and loved them. It made me realize that you cannot say something is bad before you try it. I can not recall learning how to read or who taught me. Two of my all time favorite books are A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstien. I read every poem in the books and "Hug-O-War" was my favorite along with the "Homework Machine". I hated the poem in which an older sister tries to sell her younger brother because it scared me into thinking that my sister would try selling me.

The next book I can recall is Charlotte's Web . My mom made me read in third grade, because I was home schooled. I thought it was the saddest book. At first when I began to read the book, I did not like it because I was being forced to read it. I started to really like it after a while until Charlotte died at the end and I cried. I wanted the spider to be able to live with the pig forever. After reading the book I created an admiration toward spiders. I still had this internal fear of spiders, but I felt guilty if I killed any.

The only book I remember reading before my freshman year here is The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. My dad recommended it because I was into Science Fiction, and I loved it. I could not put the book down. I read it everyday when I had free time until I finished it. During Freshman year I can remember reading Ethan Frome and Julius Caesar. Ethan Frome was such a depressing book. Julius Caesar is a better book but I got really confused sometimes and had to practically translate what was being said.

Going into Sophomore year I chose to read On the Road, by Jack Karoac, for my summer reading . This book is one of the best books I have ever read, with the exception of and Shel Silverstien book. The book gave me a great understanding for the time period and even allowed me to define myself better as a person. On the Road is probably one of the only books I have taken seriously. When I read Great Expectations last year, I thought it was a good book but I enjoy reading more when I am not forced to read. When I pick up a book voluntarily, I feel a lot more confident in what I am reading and I work harder at it.


My Relationship with Books

I cannot remember when was the time that I read my first book. What I can remember is a picture of me, very young, sits in a small room and reading, if you want to call that reading. This is the picture that I will never forget in my life. I have a really good relationship with books. I love reading. I can read any kind of book and read them over and over again without monotonous. My mother always says, " How can you read a book over 30 times and still have interest in it?" I answer her, " I just can and I don't know why." This is the kind of relationship between books and me.

When I was young, my parents were so busy that they had no time to take care of me. My father loves to read, but my mother does not. However both of them know that reading is a very important thing to children, and it will be good if me have a good habit of reading. Therefore they brought many children's books for me when I was young. I just said that my parents were very busy at work when I was young, and that time I was around two, three or four years old. This means that I had no idea how to read a book. So my mother first brought the book of £t£u£v£wwhich is the same meaning of ABC. During the daytime, my mother would put me in a small room and leave books on the ground and left me there until they got out from work. I did not really read those words in the books; I just looked at those pictures. I kind of forgot what was the feeling while I was reading that book, but I can tell that I was enjoying at it.

I have read so many books that I can't count how many of them. I start reading since I was very young, and I knew how to read without anyone's help. I think I will still keep reading books.


Reading

It's hard to remember exactly when I first began to read. I guess my earliest memories, as far as reading is concerned, is of being in my room with my mom. She would read the words and I would repeat them. I think I must have been about three because we were all still living at my grandparents house. Every night my brother, my mom, and I would gather in the room and read from a book. I do not remember which book it was or what the story was, I can just remember how happy I felt when I had finished each page.

After that I remember that when I was six my Dad bought me a book called The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. He bought me the book because I was having trouble with reading in school, and he thought this would get me interested in reading. I don't remember if I became interested in reading or not but I know I looked forward to going to my Dad's house every Wednesday to read the book.

I also remember that when I was about eight my grandmother gave me a Thornton Burgess book. This was the first chapter book I every read. After I finished the first one, she bought me another one that she found at an antique store. I must have read about 7 of these books and then we could not find anymore at the antique stores. I can vaguely remember the stories, but most I remember how proud my grandmother was with me. And, even though these books cost a lot of money she would buy them just so I would enjoy reading.

After that I really don't remember all that much. However, I do remember that when I was about eleven or twelve or so, I had a fascination with vampires. I would read anything I could get my hands on as long as it was about vampires. I read these small comical books about vampires but I easily got bored with them. My dad ended up buying me a book full of collected stories from around Europe about vampires and vampire encounters. Since these were hard to read, I didn't finish much of the book. Instead I moved on to these series of books which contain scary stories. After about the third or fourth book, I was too scared to read anymore of them and my mom took them away.

From then till about eighth grade there is a gap in my memory. In eighth grade I remember having to read The Outsiders. Reading this got me interested in reading again. I read some other books that I can not remember. Once I got into high school and began seriously writing about my reading I began taking it much more seriously. I felt that when I wrote I could prove how well I understood what I read. When I received the freshmen English award, I was surprised but very proud. This was the highlight of my reading career as of now.

In the past year I have read several books that have greatly enriched my reading experience. To Kill a Mockingbird and Great Expectations were two of my favorite books and enjoyed writing about them. Although sometimes it is a chore, generally I enjoy and appreciate reading. For the most part I feel I have had a good life when it comes to literature.