Reading. I know that for some people, the word alone makes them cringe. The thought of reading for some people is worse than getting your wisdom teeth removed without novocaine. I've never been one of those people. To me, reading has always been a pleasure and something that I would actually look forward to doing. My mom tells me that when I was 2 years old, she would find me in my closet "reading" a book. What she probably meant was that she found me sitting with a picture book in my lap that included minimal words.
I started reading "The Magic Treehouse" series around first grade, and I was hooked on the idea of escaping into a different world for just 20 minutes or even two hours. Soon enough, a trip to Barnes & Noble was a lot more interesting to me than a trip to the shopping mall. (It's a healthy mix of the two now, if you were wondering). It became a known trick in my family that, if you wanted to shut me up for a couple hours, all you had to do was bring me to a bookstore. I started with the kids' section that was filled with chapter books that only went up to 100 pages, and as I got older, I made my way around the different sections with interest and excitement.
From fifth grade to ninth grade, I went straight to the teen section of the bookstore. I devoured any book that was marked as fiction. There would be many times that I would walk up to the section and recognize at least five books that I'd already completed. I don't blame myself for growing out of those type of books, though. I mean, how many times could I read about the same girl, who lives in a small beach town and falls in love with a guy she's known forever? The answer is about 50 times.
Towards the end of ninth grade, I started to fall in love with the Kennedy family and I found a genuine interest in them. I began to walk directly towards the bookstore section labeled American History. I became really interested in the life of people before my time, and how the power these people had shaped the world. To me, seeing these people as regular humans, rather than presidents or superstars, gave me a whole new appreciation for all the people that came before me.
I'm still in that stage, and I continue to be. I'm not going to lie, sometimes it's hard to find time to sit down and open a book of my choosing when I'm at school, but when I can, it's one of the best parts of my day.
