Bibliography

Ever since I was a little girl, I can remember reading. I read everywhere I went. I was a little nerd. My parents and my grandparents read to me all the time. I still love the feeling of starting a new book.
I think a big benefit for me was that my mom is a second grade teacher. She loves to read, and she passed that love to me. I took a book everywhere with me. I used to read at the dinner table too. I got in trouble a few times for that. To this day I still read when I eat at home. It is about the only time I can find to read something that is not a textbook.
I read all kinds of books when I was younger. When I started I read Dr. Seuss and Disney books. My mom told me about a time when I was in her classroom when I was about 3. She said one of her kids saw me "reading" a Dr. Seuss book. She told them that I really just had the book memorized because she had read it to me so many times. I read Baby Sitter’s Club, Goosebumps, and Nancy Drew. I liked going to the library to check out books too. My favorite kinds of books to check out were science books. I know I checked out a book about the Bermuda Triangle a lot. I loved reading the stories about the unknown. I remember having that book and then figuring out that my parents were going on a trip and they were going to fly through the Bermuda Triangle. I was so scared that they were going to disappear. I still like hearing or reading about things that are unexplained.
We had the AR reading program in my elementary school. I actually enjoyed it. I liked reading and I was always a few levels above. I do not know if was supposed to be a competition, but I felt like it was and I liked that. I was on a basal ball team in elementary school. Basal ball is a reading competition. We would read words out loud from a screen. The words were on different levels of difficulty. Some were first base words, second base words, and so on. We also had home run words. I loved this competition. We scored points for every time we crossed home base. We would travel around and compete against other teams. I learned a lot of words through this competition.
In junior high I began to read more difficult books. I read John Grisham’s "A Time to Kill" and loved it. It was so intense and I loved the trial aspect of it. I still read a lot on my own, but we also started reading in out literature and language arts classes. The only thing I can remember reading specifically in class was The Odyssey and a lot of Greek mythology stories. I was not a fan. We also memorized poems and the preamble to the Declaration. We did read some Edgar Allan Poe poems and I started reading some of his work on my own.
In high school we read so much Shakespeare, I could care less to ever read another work by Shakespeare again. I did actually like to read the plays out loud. I also read "The Great Gatsby" and "To Kill a Mockingbird". Those are two of my favorite books now. I hated reading "The Metamorphosis", and I had to read it again in an Introduction to Fiction class three years ago. I still do not see the beauty or brilliance of this story. I hate that reading in high school darkened my view of reading somewhat. I really enjoy poetry, but I hated over-analyzing and memorizing it in class. We could not just read it and appreciate it; we had to find iambic pentameter and deeper meaning in the words. I still to this day cannot figure out why that was necessary.
Although now about the only time I read for pleasure is to read children’s books, I still love to read. I love opening a book for the first time and that feeling of finishing a good story.