Personal Narrative: How Reading Changed My Life

As a child, I didn’t like to read; I wasn’t very good at it. It always seemed that everyone else around me was better at it, so I kind of gave up. If I could get away with not reading, I would! On the contrary, I loved hearing stories and having people read to me, but I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, do it myself. Reading had always intimidated me; the words, the meanings, nothing ever made since to me. Making me read was like pinning someone to a cross, pure torture in my eyes; I only read when I had to. This hatred for reading was carried throughout most of my education.
By the time elementary came, I had become a better reader but I was still far behind my fellow classmates. I was embarrassed anytime we had to read during class because I was always …show more content…
Bush. At first, I really hated that class; I thought it was going to be the end of me. We were assigned many novels, some short and some extremely long. I remember diving into our first novel thinking, ‘I’ll just suffer through this and get my grade.’ As I began to get deeper and deeper into the book, I started to realize I didn’t want to put it down. Before I knew it, I was reading the last page wishing it wasn’t over. The more books we read in class, I was opened to the power of books and the power of words. How it takes you to a whole new world and yet it relates to everything that is happening now in some way. ‘That is the terrible, wonderful power of reading: the texts we create in our own minds while we read – or just after we read – become part of the life we believe we lived.’ (Murray). Reading and making connections helped me realize what was going on in my own life and I could see and understand more. My eyes were really opened to a whole new world. The books that many of my classmates found ‘boring’ I found interesting and I could relate to every single one, in some strange roundabout way. I don’t think I had ever read so much in a school year than I did in this