Today I wanted to talk about my experience with literature in High School and some of my favorites. But before I talk about how I saw lit in HS, I should talk about how I became a bookworm. From my very early ages I loved books. Growing up on bedtime stories, audiobooks (on cassette of course), and Shakespeare puppet shows, I have loved literature from my very first memories.
My favorite story of this is when my mom tried to impose a limit on how many books we could take out from the library. This was when my sister and I were really young, sub ten years old for sure. She said we could only take out as many books as we could carry. Before this we would fill our rooms with books, over 100 each of these picture books, so this was her attempt to bring order to that chaos. So she did her own library things and left us to make our selections very carefully. Well what we did is went to the car where my mom kept bags to carry groceries and we brought them in and filled them. We had four or five bags full to the brim of books, over 100 yet again and were dragging them to the car. And yet people took pity on us and carried them to the car for us. We looked suitably unable to carry them and desperate enough. That was the end of library limitations.
So that’s what I mean when I say I have always loved literature. It has been in the very fabric of my life from before I could read. And since then. I always enrolled in advanced English classes in Middle School and especially in High School. I would read in all of my free time, devouring books. My passion for discussing and analyzing literature grew then. I had one teacher who was responsible for this. She breathed life into them. Parading around like Miss Haversham from Great Expectations was the highlight. But even more, her passion for literature translated to me. I felt something akin to that. A need to talk about it. To write about it. This began my love of dystopias, comparing 1984 and Brave New World.
I went to college and my passion exploded. There were so many courses I could take, so many ways I could talk about books. It was a dream come true. I thrived on that passion for six years through two degrees. I completed two theses in which I talked about my love of aliens, cyborgs, and the role they will play in our future. And here I am today, where I review them as a hobby. A hobby I spend over ten hours per week, where I read two books per week, and where I love every second. Each moment of stress, of new worlds, and fantastic heroines.
And it all started there. It started with my parents who read to me and showed me how important books were. How crucial they were to my life, to my growing up.
Discussion
What inspired your love of reading? What was your reading journey?
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I don’t remember a time I wasn’t a member of a library and couldn’t live without them. There was no one in particular that inspired me to read, it was simply that everyone I grew up surrounded by family wise did.
The library is so overlooked, but it’s also so lucky to have a great library 🙂
I fell in love with literature at a young age too. Great Expectations was definitely a favorite of mine!
It’s always amazing how a good teacher can make literature come alive 😀
How beautiful! I never really got a chance to read a lot when I was younger. I’m the only bookworm in the family and really only got to read books out of my school library (which wasn’t very big). I always enjoyed reading for class, but didn’t own a lot of books, save for Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (can you tell I was a kid who enjoyed horror?) It wasn’t until I picked up Harry Potter that my love for books really blossomed. I needed each book as soon as they were released and so that’s who I credit with turning me into a bookworm.
If we met as kids, I would have been in awe of you! Those were always too scary for me 😛 And the Harry Potter phenomenon for our generation is truly wonderful 🙂
If we met as kids, I would have been the friend who read these scary stories out loud to you in a trembling voice 😉 Hopefully, we’d still be friends afterwards.
FOR SURE!