Reading and My Childhood Memories

     

    Hello guys! I am Mia Liu. This is a reading and writing class, so I want to share my related stories with you first.

   

    Since I was tiny, reading has seemed to be the biggest hobby in my life. My parents were busy at work, which caused the slim chances they took me out to travel or even just went to the park. They had high expectations of me, so they also banned me from watching too much TV or spending time playing with toys. Since then, reading has been a way for me to escape to an imaginary world. I couldn't travel, while I could witness how stunning the world is through the author's description and colorful images of books. When I stayed at home alone, funny plots in story-telling books were things that accompanied me to go through those boring times. I guess that might be the enlightenment of reading for me. However, despite that, I still don't recognize myself as a reader.

    My whole childhood is about reading, and there was once a competition that the school held to see which students could read most books and give the reflection of each book ( I not only did such thing in college, but also in elementary school, and to be honest, I enjoyed it a lot at that time! lamo). I won that competition in the end. While ever since I went to junior and senior high school, the time I had spent reading was gradually replaced with cram school and tons of exercise papers. I didn't conclude any valued ideas or impactful thoughts from books on my own anymore. Instead, I got them from textbooks. The balance of my own interest and academic grade tilted, which was terribly irreversible. I forgot the happiness of reading; I no longer read a book because I loved it, but 

because it would help my academic grade. It turned out that the loss of passion for reading was unpleasant, for after I finished my test, I forgot all things I memorized or learned from books. 

    Not until I went to college did I thus have more time to pursue my own interest, while developing a hobby is not that easy, especially when the pursuit was once be twisted to something dull and meaningless to me. Besides, I hadn't found any starting point to pick up reading again. I lost reading for such a long time, while I still remembered how it influenced me and how much I loved it. 

    Through our first class, I learned how essential reading is once again. It is a repository of imagination and creativeness. Fortunately, I am in this class, which can be my starting point to "love" reading again, and I appreciate that. 

    I hope this class will be an eventful journey for me, evoke something from my childhood memory, and possess it again.