My Love for Books. SIKE

I'm really not the bookworm type. I don't exactly remember how I learned to read, probably at home with my mother shoving flash cards down my throat, but I remember that I loathed it. When I was a wee little girl, we had a reading system called Accelerated Reading, or A.R. You would read a book then take a quiz on it. It would take me a long time to read a book and actually apprehend what was happening. All of the other kids in my class would read a book and quiz over it in one day. So then, it came to be a competition for me. I felt like it was a game, and everybody was beating me. That's how my animosity for reading launched.

Let me explain to you how A.R. works. The books were ranked on levels by grade, 1st to 12th. So say I was reading a Magic School Bus book. That would be a second grade level book, considering the pictures, vocabulary, word count, etc. Depending on how small or easy the book was depicted how many questions there would be on the test you took. The years in which A.R. lived, there was an appealing, decorated wall in the cafeteria that had all of the wonderous children who were the top-notch, overachievers that could read anything and understand it. Can you guess who's picture never made it on that wall? This girl. After about 4th grade, I gave up trying too; it seemed like what I was doing was never good enough. I get that this whole shabang was to help kids practice reading comprehension, but not all of us have benefited. Maybe I'm wrong, but that could be why I hate reading now. I would always compare my speed and such to the other children.

So, as you can see for yourself, my reading history didnt have a tremendous start. And here I am today, with mixed feelings about it. There have been a few books that I've read and finished, and did end up enjoying them, but nothing has really stuck with me yet. It doesn't help that I was born into a family of booklovers. It breaks my sister's heart to hear me talk so harshly of reading books. My dad has made me three different memberships at thre different libraries, including a big one in Memphis, and I'm not interested at all. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that I am adopted at this point. My poor teachers have tried their best to make me a reader; it just hasn't happened yet. And take note that I said YET. I know one day it will hit me like a train, and I won't be able to keep my hands off of a book.

The very few books that I have read and liked are the teenage love stories; as if there's any other genre a 15 year old girl would read. I would say Nicholas Sparks is the only person that can actually please me with his books.