My Literary Being

My Literary Being

Literature is not my favorite form of entertainment; however, it is not the most irritating activity of my life. Knowledge is the most powerful element of the world; therefore, I am thankful that I have participated in the Honors English program in high school, for without that class I would practically be illiterate. I have read many novels, stories, and poems that I absolutely loathed to read. Moreover, I have read pieces that were the pure brilliance of humanity at work.

Generally, I tend to compose a narrative with a slightly older diction than most writers my age would do today. This is based on the main type of literature that I tend to enjoy reading, which are mainly old English stories. When I was a younger, my mother would take my siblings and me to the local library to pick out books to read for that week. My brother would choose books of the science fiction genre, my sister would choose picture books, and I would choose classic and wilderness adventure novels. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Jean Craighead George were among my favorite authors. These stories were of brave protagonists that weathered against all and finally conquered using their intuition and cleverness. They were not fierce brutes, but generally children taking the place of an adult situation. Hence, my respect for educators and my strong will to succeed educationally.

I read and write about things that are relevant to my values and beliefs. Everyone has different reasons for choosing the genre/themes of literature he or she reads for enjoyment. My favored themes are those of mental ingenuity defying physical strength. Therefore, I try to learn from books with this principle concept and defy the physical world in order to engage in the mental orb of life. One of my favorite novels is My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. It is about a boy who survives in the Catskill Mountains. He finds a way to make acorn pancakes out of normally poisonous nuts. For shelter, he carves a hole in the tree big enough for him to live in during the harsh winters. Sam Gribley, the boy, uses his ingenuity to survive the wilderness. This novel combines keenness of the mind and Mother Nature’s cunningness, which affect everyone’s everyday life.

My parents have played an important role in encouraging me to read more than assigned during school. For example, my father enjoys reading just about anything he can get his hands on to read; this is because both of his parents are avid readers who consistently have a piece of literature they are enjoying. In fact, my grandmother writes book reviews for various books. This deciphering of texts has been passed on to my father and down to my siblings and me. My mother, on the other hand, rarely reads for enjoyment. She primarily reads for her job or like reasons. Her parents came from simpler means and did not engage in the literary world as often.

I personally do not loathe reading for entertainment, but I generally do find other activities to occupy my time. Sometimes, on a rainy day, I will crack open one of the many volumes in our makeshift library/family room and retreat to another world. As my high school years have passed, I progressively have embarked into a novel purely for enjoyment during my leisure time. As more books have been put on my read list, my vocabulary has grown expansively in shorter amounts of time, which have improved my writing abilities tremendously. With a broader lexicon, I can compose better pieces of composition in which to express myself.

Throughout my life as a student, I have learned a great deal from word of mouth; however, books generally contain more retainable information. My introverted demeanor permits me to understand text better than spoken words. In the new age of computers, I have found that I would rather read a physical book than a text via the Internet. When I read a book, I need the whole effect: the smell of ink that has resided on the pages for some time (the longer the better), the swooshing sound that every page makes when each are turned, the feel of the leathery paper binding, and the times new roman text covering the book from the inside out.

There is no composition without literacy and no literacy without composition. This is the main theme of the world: without one thing, there cannot be another. As my reading ability grew, my glossary of terms doubled, and thus as a direct correlation my writing ability expanded. I am not a Rhodes Scholar or professional novelist; however, I am closer now than I have ever been and continue to inch closer day by day.