Relative Reading
Marian Robertson
ENGL 1100.46

I have never liked reading. I have never really gone out of my way to read a book. I’ve always only read books because I’ve had to read them. Until recently, I never thought I read that much or thought reading affected me. A recent Design project that I’ve had has made me come to realize both that I have read more than I thought I had and how much I’ve related to many books in more ways than I actually thought I did.

In high school, I was normally forced to read stuff that never caught my attention. Hamlet (1602) and Macbeth (1606), both by Shakespeare, and any other old literature were so hard to read and did not make any sense. Then the teachers would get us to write essays on it, and I did not even know what the story was about. How was I going to write a 5-page essay on the stuff? There were only a couple of books that I actually read in whole. The same goes with my English teachers. I only enjoyed about two of my English teachers in high school. They actually did give us some books that were interesting to read. In eighth grade, my favorite English teacher, Mrs. D tried to appeal to what most of us liked. I remember her assigning Tuck Everlasting, Pigman, and Of Mice and Men. I found Tuck Everlasting very interesting because the children in the book were around my age. I remember her assigning us Pigman because everyone thought that sounded so weird, but my class ended up really enjoying it. Pigman and Of Mice and Men were two books that were a lot different from what I had normally read in English. One book that I read for a book report one summer, Catcher in the Rye, I thought was not going to be good at all. I figured just by the title of the book it was going to be boring. As I began to read, I realized that the narrator was around my age. He cussed a lot and his life was very different from a normal sixteen year old. Now that I think more and more about reading, I generally enjoy reading stuff that I can pretend to have my life be like or relate to my life. I did not realize this until the other day.

In my Design I class, we were asked to find pictures for a project that we had coming up soon. He told us that the pictures had to have plain colors and not a lot of shading in them to make it easier for us to paint. He suggested for us to use children’s books because a lot of children’s books have plain colors. So, I decided to check at home for books that I had when I was younger. I figured it would be more interesting to paint something that I enjoyed when I was younger. I thought about all the children’s books I had loved and how a lot of them would have colorful pictures and would be something fun that I could paint. When I got home, I asked my mom if she had kept any of my brother’s and my children’s books. She had all of our favorite children books under her bed in a box. So I lay across her bed and pulled the box out from under her bed. There was a mixture of books in the box, some full of pictures and some with no pictures at all. Big Al, a book about a big fish, along with other books, such as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, Fannie, and The Unicorn without a Horn, were full of interesting pictures. Tuck Everlasting, and some of The Boxcar Children and Goosebumps books, had little to no pictures in them.

As I was looking through them, I started picking up certain books and reminiscing about how my mother read some of the books to me. Around the age that I was learning to read, my mother would sit down with me at night and have me read a short book to her, and then she would read to me. I had never really realized how much my mother had read to me until I started going through those books. I thought about how much I had enjoyed hearing my mother’s voice and how my imagination would go wild while she was reading. Though she generally did not change her voice to act like a character much, I could still get a good idea on my own of what a character would sound like. I remember her voice being so relaxing and how nice it was to have her read to me at night. She normally chose to read to me at night, for about an hour, right before I went to bed. I would normally read a really short story, with lots of pictures, first, and then she would read one to me, most of the time one with no pictures at all. Though I remember a lot of the books my mother read to me, there were a couple that she has told me she read to me, but I do not remember them at all. I do remember falling asleep to some of the stories while she read to me at night.

One book I remember that she read to me was Heidi. It was one of the longer books she read to me. I loved imagining how everything was in the book. I thought about how awesome it would be to be like Heidi. In the beginning of the story, I felt sorry for her. Not having parents, and being forced to live with a grandfather that she did not know much about, caught my attention right from the start. I could not exactly relate to that, since both my parents are alive and I do not have a grandfather, but the idea of what she was going through really had me thinking. Things gradually start working out for her and she starts to enjoy living with her grandfather. I remember my mother reading that book to me more than any of the other books she had read to me. I remember imagining the different scenes in the book as she read it. It was so descriptive. I remember one scene from the book where it talks about the room she stays in at her grandfather’s. I think there is a window that faces the sky, and the book mentions how she likes looking at the stars at night. I liked pretending that I was Heidi in my imagination as my mother would read. Sometimes I even imagined I was her and would have my mother pull my hair up in braided pig-tails.

As I got older, two of the books I read and for which I loved pretending I was the main character were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In third grade, I believe, we read the story and then watched a movie based upon the story. One of my friends and I would pretend like we were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I always pretended to be Tom and my friend, Casey, would be Huckleberry. Casey would use this country-sounding voice to make her sound more like what Huckleberry would sound like, being that he had little to no education, unlike Tom. We would play on my swing set and pretend it was our fort. In my backyard, we have a small garden in which we grow corn and other vegetables. Casey and I would pretend like we were stealing vegetables from someone’s garden, so we would have something to eat. We would be sneaky about it and if we saw my dad around the garden, we would always take off running.

I also remember around fourth grade, my class was really into The Boxcar Children series and the Goosebumps series. Those stories did not really interest me that much, but I did read them, mainly because a lot of other people in my class read them. Also, they were easy to read, and I could use them for book reports. Before the fourth grade, when I was at the age when I was still learning to read, I remember my mother reading one of the Goosebumps books to me. It was The Haunted House, the first one in the series. That book freaked me out. I did not really like reading those books after my mother read it to me. It was different from the other Goosebumps books because it did not end the way most of them end. It leaves the reader hanging, in a scary way.

When I think about all the children’s books that I use to read, I started realizing how interesting and fun it would be to illustrate those types of books. I have always been into drawing, and when I was younger, I would try to draw characters from the books that I used to read. Garfield, the main character of the comic Garfield, and also the main character in the television series, Garfield and Friends, was a character that I was really interested in when I was younger. He was one of the first cartoon characters that I learned to draw, and I would draw him over and over again. Illustrating a cartoon comic would be something interesting that I could take up as a profession. I have thought about illustrating cartoons since I was younger. I think I would definitely enjoy that profession, since I really enjoy drawing. Illustrations really help a book come to life, especially when it is a child’s book. Though a lot of people like to use their imagination to help picture the characters in book, children’s books do not have much descriptions of characters, so illustrations help the children. Pictures make the child want to and try to figure out what the book is about. I think it would be a lot of fun helping an author bring a book to life.

As I look back on books I used to read or had read to me, I realize that I would act like the main character. Now, when I do read, I like having the subject of the story relate to my life. I like reading stuff that relates to my life instead of having my life relate to the story. To me, it’s always a good feeling when someone is going through something in their life, to know someone else is going through the same thing or has gone through the same thing. I like to see how characters react to a situation that is similar to anything I’ve gone through. Now, I cannot say that I’ve ever solved any of my problems from what I’ve read and how someone else dealt with something, but knowing how they dealt with it helped me out. I enjoy reading stuff when the main character is around my age. I’m beginning to realize that I read more than I thought, and how much reading does affect my life in some way or other, but I still believe reading is "not my thing." Sure, I’ve read a lot of things that I have related to, but I just do not like reading unless I have to. I do, though, read a lot more than I really think I do.