My Favorite Memory Of Reading

My earliest memory of reading comes from my K-3 class where we read simple little books at our desks with small sentences like “The horse is large” or “The chicken is red.” They were for us to practice recognizing our colors, animals and sizes. Now I know sitting in a classroom reading is not what every three-year-old was doing, but it was a Christian private school named Bethel Christian Academy that prided themselves on their early readers who would eventually grow up to skip grades and send their children to the same school in the future. My parents are big on education, so they did whatever they thought would help us advance in school, including buying the bible on CD and playing it every night while we slept. During the summer, my mother

goal. If I reached or exceeded the goal, I was given awards like limo rides, pizza party, and early release for field day at the end of the school year. However, I did not just read whatever I picked up. If a book did not seem interesting in the first three chapters, I would give up on it and return it to the library for something different. No matter what I read, it was for my own personal enjoyment first and foremost. The Series of Unfortunate Events is still by far one of my most favorites series of books. I could not stop reading those books. Anytime I had a break, I was reading during subject changes in class, during lunch, during P.E., in between homework assignments and before and after dinner. Reading those books is what I remember most about third grade. Now, whenever I find a good series of books, like The Hunger Games, I hold on to them tight. High school was the same until my teachers started assigning summer readings and extensive assignments to go along with the readings as well as a test during the first week of school on all the readings. The only book I think I may have out right hated was the Scarlet Letter. I thought that the idea of the story was good, but the 19th century language threw me for a loop. I ended up spark noting the chapters every week. This particular incident did affect me, but not significantly, because I still enjoy reading as a leisure activity over anything physical or any activity outdoors.

The first of our two assigned books proved my hypothesis to be true. Haroun and the Sea of Stories kept me captivated the whole way through. The development of a relationship between Haroun’s mother, Soraya, and their upstairs neighbor, Mr. Sengupta, hooked me. I love a juicy story about infidelity. Naturally, the beginning of the story poisoned me against the two infidels, and I found myself wishing their relationship nothing but unhappiness. I felt that since he had repeatedly filled her head with thoughts of her husband’s “head in the air and his feet off the ground”, they both deserved to suffer (Rushdie 19). Towards the end of the story, I made the connection that he poisoned her thoughts like Khattam Shud poisoned the sea of stories. Before Haroun was visited by Iff, the water genie, he even questioned the reasoning behind “telling stories that weren’t true” (Rushdie 20). Haroun got the opportunity to learn why on his visit to this fantasy world, his dad spoke of, turned real. In this book, there are several plays on the traditional princess rescue story which I found refreshingly funny, even though I may be borderline obsessed with the idea of being a princess and being rescued by a handsome prince. Yes, I have read a countless princess stories and imagined that I was the princess in every one of them. I often find myself looking into other