Post by Ciel on Jan 5, 2014 0:09:09 GMT -5
Hello! This is an excerpt from an autobiography I have to write for one of my classes. The idea is using my bookshelf to explain, well, me. This is the first part. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!
I’ll start somewhere simple:
The books.
I’m a reader.
On my tall, skinny bookshelf, white washed, and much too narrow in my opinion, my books are starting to run out of room as my collection grows daily, no thanks to my job in the bookstore.
But that wasn’t always the case. I’m not proud to say that I haven’t always been a reader. When I was younger, in elementary school and on into middle school, I, well, there’s no other more accurate word to describe my feeling than hated reading. I’d see a book and groan, thinking of all the pages and words I’d have battle.
When my siblings and I were young, my parents read to us, a lot. They read children’s picture books when we were in preschool, and then the Redwall series when we got a little older. That wasn’t so bad. It was just storytelling. I didn’t mind one bit. The dark days came later.
My memories of the first series I ever read on my own run parallel to a distinct disdain towards reading. The books came sometime around first or second grade, I think, and it was none other than The Magic Tree House books. I remember finding the first one, and for the life of me, can’t figure out where it came from. It might have belonged to my older sister, but for some reason, I always felt like a pioneer to those books, like I discovered them, and the memories are too foggy to prove that wrong.
When I picked up that first paperback, my mom advised me that there were words in there that were much too big for me, like Pterodactyl and Tyrannosaurus (both of which I still can’t spell). But I was stubborn, really, looking back. (I think now that that was the root of many of my childhood arguments and problems). I decided to muscle my way through the book, only occasionally stopping to ask my mom what an unfamiliar word meant, and to which she willingly supplied a sufficient answer.
I loved it.
It seemed that these books were, well, magical, to say the least. They were not about princesses locked in towers, or little mice who wanted cookies, but about adventure. I could do anything.
I could travel to Pompeii or visit ancient Rome or fight a war, or be a princess and get out of the locked tower all by myself, any day of the week, any time of the year, and all I had to do was turn a page. In a sense, they really were magical.
I devoured those books, pouring over pages whenever I got the chance. Soon enough, I started reading other things on my own, taking weekly trips to the school library and finding a new adventure in short novels. Don’t get me started on book fairs.
I’m not sure when the allure died down, but by the time someone gave me a copy of Eragon, I couldn’t stand it. I liked the short books, not this monster. I got books for Christmas that I never read, and when someone asked, I said I didn’t like reading. I must have been in fourth or fifth grade by then. I am ashamed of myself.
I’m not going to say that there’s anything wrong with not liking to read; I’m just sad that I managed to let that joy I felt when exploring some new world slip away for years.
But, eventually, it came back.
I think the remedy came somewhere between Eragon and seventh grade.
I think it was Inkheart.
There was a copy of it in my house, and it seemed interesting, but I didn’t want to read it. So when we went to the library, I got audiobooks, novels on tape, and I would listen to them until I fell asleep. I probably listened to Inkheart two or three times before I picked up the book and read it, cover to cover.
Slowly, I started reading again. Of course, I was moving at a snail pace, probably because of my stubbornness. I didn’t want to admit to the people who had I ranted to about hating reading for so long, that I was enjoying it now. But little by little, my appetite grew.
That same spark that was there when I was little listening to my dad read about all the Redwall creatures and their adventures and challenges and victories woke up.
I’ve read books that made me laugh, made my cry, and made me rethink my place in the universe. I’ve read about the stars and pirates and zombies and crimes and old English moors. I’ve been a thousand places, and lived a thousand lives, as any reader has.
Then came the writing. I’m starting to think that my older sister was not only the root of many arguments (as we were both about as stubborn as could be, and really, still are), but also the root of a lot of good in my life. She let me read a story she started. I was shocked.
All the adventures I had read about in such elegant and clear language seemed so far away, distant authors I would never meet living in places I might never see. But she had put her own words on a page, and it was good.
I said to myself, “Normal people can write like that?”
It seems silly now, but I swear to you, those were the words that came out of my mouth.
A few years later, I tried it. And, well, what do you know? People said I was good.
And now, years after that, there’s not one, but two anthologies with my work published alongside other brilliant writer’s, most living in some corner of Vermont, my age or younger, not yet out of high school (and many not even in high school yet!), but creating tales and worlds and beautiful pieces of art out of words, and they’re some of the best I’ve ever seen.
I’m a reader, and when I look through the pages, these writers inspire me, make me laugh, make me cry, and take me on adventures, just like every good story hopes to do.
The point of all this is on the bottom row of my bookshelf, there’s a stack of children’s books that my parents read to me when I was little; on the top shelf, I keep the anthologies, and journals with my writing.
And on the shelves in-between?
There’s all the books that got me there.
Every page of all the lessons, pieces of history and fantasy, adventure and drama, scandals and science, fear and villains, most of all, hope. They were everything I wanted to be when I was younger.
Even though today I don’t have a magic tree house, I still hold on to that sense of adventure, the joy of seeing new places and the drive to learn new things, and you can't tell me that that seed didn't start growing in the pages of a picture book.
I’ll start somewhere simple:
The books.
I’m a reader.
On my tall, skinny bookshelf, white washed, and much too narrow in my opinion, my books are starting to run out of room as my collection grows daily, no thanks to my job in the bookstore.
But that wasn’t always the case. I’m not proud to say that I haven’t always been a reader. When I was younger, in elementary school and on into middle school, I, well, there’s no other more accurate word to describe my feeling than hated reading. I’d see a book and groan, thinking of all the pages and words I’d have battle.
When my siblings and I were young, my parents read to us, a lot. They read children’s picture books when we were in preschool, and then the Redwall series when we got a little older. That wasn’t so bad. It was just storytelling. I didn’t mind one bit. The dark days came later.
My memories of the first series I ever read on my own run parallel to a distinct disdain towards reading. The books came sometime around first or second grade, I think, and it was none other than The Magic Tree House books. I remember finding the first one, and for the life of me, can’t figure out where it came from. It might have belonged to my older sister, but for some reason, I always felt like a pioneer to those books, like I discovered them, and the memories are too foggy to prove that wrong.
When I picked up that first paperback, my mom advised me that there were words in there that were much too big for me, like Pterodactyl and Tyrannosaurus (both of which I still can’t spell). But I was stubborn, really, looking back. (I think now that that was the root of many of my childhood arguments and problems). I decided to muscle my way through the book, only occasionally stopping to ask my mom what an unfamiliar word meant, and to which she willingly supplied a sufficient answer.
I loved it.
It seemed that these books were, well, magical, to say the least. They were not about princesses locked in towers, or little mice who wanted cookies, but about adventure. I could do anything.
I could travel to Pompeii or visit ancient Rome or fight a war, or be a princess and get out of the locked tower all by myself, any day of the week, any time of the year, and all I had to do was turn a page. In a sense, they really were magical.
I devoured those books, pouring over pages whenever I got the chance. Soon enough, I started reading other things on my own, taking weekly trips to the school library and finding a new adventure in short novels. Don’t get me started on book fairs.
I’m not sure when the allure died down, but by the time someone gave me a copy of Eragon, I couldn’t stand it. I liked the short books, not this monster. I got books for Christmas that I never read, and when someone asked, I said I didn’t like reading. I must have been in fourth or fifth grade by then. I am ashamed of myself.
I’m not going to say that there’s anything wrong with not liking to read; I’m just sad that I managed to let that joy I felt when exploring some new world slip away for years.
But, eventually, it came back.
I think the remedy came somewhere between Eragon and seventh grade.
I think it was Inkheart.
There was a copy of it in my house, and it seemed interesting, but I didn’t want to read it. So when we went to the library, I got audiobooks, novels on tape, and I would listen to them until I fell asleep. I probably listened to Inkheart two or three times before I picked up the book and read it, cover to cover.
Slowly, I started reading again. Of course, I was moving at a snail pace, probably because of my stubbornness. I didn’t want to admit to the people who had I ranted to about hating reading for so long, that I was enjoying it now. But little by little, my appetite grew.
That same spark that was there when I was little listening to my dad read about all the Redwall creatures and their adventures and challenges and victories woke up.
I’ve read books that made me laugh, made my cry, and made me rethink my place in the universe. I’ve read about the stars and pirates and zombies and crimes and old English moors. I’ve been a thousand places, and lived a thousand lives, as any reader has.
Then came the writing. I’m starting to think that my older sister was not only the root of many arguments (as we were both about as stubborn as could be, and really, still are), but also the root of a lot of good in my life. She let me read a story she started. I was shocked.
All the adventures I had read about in such elegant and clear language seemed so far away, distant authors I would never meet living in places I might never see. But she had put her own words on a page, and it was good.
I said to myself, “Normal people can write like that?”
It seems silly now, but I swear to you, those were the words that came out of my mouth.
A few years later, I tried it. And, well, what do you know? People said I was good.
And now, years after that, there’s not one, but two anthologies with my work published alongside other brilliant writer’s, most living in some corner of Vermont, my age or younger, not yet out of high school (and many not even in high school yet!), but creating tales and worlds and beautiful pieces of art out of words, and they’re some of the best I’ve ever seen.
I’m a reader, and when I look through the pages, these writers inspire me, make me laugh, make me cry, and take me on adventures, just like every good story hopes to do.
The point of all this is on the bottom row of my bookshelf, there’s a stack of children’s books that my parents read to me when I was little; on the top shelf, I keep the anthologies, and journals with my writing.
And on the shelves in-between?
There’s all the books that got me there.
Every page of all the lessons, pieces of history and fantasy, adventure and drama, scandals and science, fear and villains, most of all, hope. They were everything I wanted to be when I was younger.
Even though today I don’t have a magic tree house, I still hold on to that sense of adventure, the joy of seeing new places and the drive to learn new things, and you can't tell me that that seed didn't start growing in the pages of a picture book.
