[Post 56] Literacy Narrative: Someone who taught me to read.

      How many books do you read on average in a year? When I was an elementary school student, I hated to read books. I rarely read more than ten books in a year. I did not notice how I could refresh my mind by reading books, until I became middle school age. I believed that looking at books only made me feel bored or even more, fall asleep, like sleeping tablets. However, I changed the way I thought about reading books, positively, through my father, a tutor, and my friend.

      At first, my father had an enormous influence on my reading habits. My father usually looked at books or newspapers after dinner. I have a clear recollection of a conversation between my mother and me. I said "Mommy, I cannot understand my daddy that he reads books every night instead of playing with me!" Then, my mother responded "My sweetie, why do not you try talking with him about what you read. I am sure that you and your daddy will have a free discussion about your reading." From that day, I was curious about the debate between me and my father, so I tried to read books. I found it tiring to begin with, but I soon got used to it. Finally I had finished the novel, Momo, which was my father's first recommendation. The book is fantasy novel, which is about how humans spend their time in modern societies. It was a pretty thick book for a nine-year-old girl; however, I had taken to it in a short time. I and my father had a discussion about time management, and I made my time schedule, which included reading time with my father every single day. Moreover, he sometimes showed me movies which were related to book that I had already read. Those methods made me to get interested in looking at books, especially novels.

      In addition, the second person who taught me to read books was my reading tutor. In most previous reading lessons, I had to read at least one book in a week, and turn in a book report. However, the tutor was teaching me how I got interested in books, not just reading or looking at. When I was young, bookstores, where I had gone with my mother, were small local ones. However, the tutor took me to grand bookstores, and we enjoyed seeing various kinds of books. I did not like to read books, but I began to like to go to those huge bookstores. That gave me many opportunities to see various genres of books, and I figured out that I like to smell books. The only genres I was familiar with were fiction, biography, and poetry. However, there are a lot of genres which include autobiography, fantasy, and etc. It was huge impact on me, because I wanted to look at different genres of books by knowing that. Furthermore, my preference of smelling books made me want to keep possessing, and consequently, looking at books. And when I taking her lessons, my tutor and I made a promise; if I read given books in a month, she would go to bookstore once a month. As I was a young girl at that time, I tried to keep the promise. For those reasons, I soon became interested in books, and besides, I came to be fond of reading.

      At last, one of my friends taught me a special way to read books. In South Korea, all twenty-year-old boys and girls celebrate one day, which is called Coming-of-Age day. It is customary that parents or someone, who would like to celebrate the boys and girls, gives them a bouquet of roses and a perfume. By the way, one of my friends gave me a novel, On Love, with a piece of message, "I hope that you enjoy this book, and you are going to like this book." It was a pretty common message; however, I felt something from it. The book is written by Alain de Botton, and it is about the philosophical love. It was difficult to understand not only the plot, but also each sentence, although it is written in my first language, Korean. So I tried to keep reading the book as many times as it took so that I could understand. And I found out that every single reading gives me different feeling toward the same book. For example, if I felt sorrowfulness to the main character at first, on the other hand, I felt joyfulness. In addition, I could speed up the rate of reading, which was one of my weak points in reading. When I was young, I had low rate, so I usually looked at book inferiority. Therefore, I could encourage myself by increasing my rate of reading and knowing what the enjoyment of repetition of reading. My friend did not ask me to do something about my reading habit directly; however, the book with a piece of message inspired me to have interests in reading.

      Those three people, my father, the tutor, and my friend, taught me to read in various ways. Those methods were totally different from each other, however, all of them made me have interests in reading and books. I believe that being interested in reading and books is the most important thing to improve one's reading habits. Therefore I could not help mentioning those three people, in particular.