My Life as a Reader

So I thought I would get started by talking about my life in terms of reading. When I was a child I loved to be read to. I would wake up early in the morning and, gathering as many picture books as I could possibly carry, I would stagger out into the living room where my mom would be up and ready to read to me until my brother woke up and disturbed us. Learning to read in Kindergarten and first grade marked a dramatic shift in my attitude toward books. Frankly, I hated everything about having to read for myself. For all the crying and drama I made around reading you would think my parents and teacher were making me put my stuffed animals in a blender. The Montessori school I attended didn't help matters either. When we moved and I was put into public school in second grade, my independent reading ability took off. I went from struggling through Hop on Pop to reading the first four Harry Potter books by the time I reached third grade. I read everything I touched. In fact, I still have with me in my dorm room a "Reading is Cool" pennant I won in third grade for having read the most books in my grade. Suffice to say, books became, and still are, a source of entertainment, knowledge, comfort, escape, mental stimulation, mindless pleasure, and anything in between.  When I entered high school my free time dramatically decreased and so did the volume of books I read. Now that I am in college, the time I have to spend with books has decreased even more. As such, I don't have time to waste on books that I don't enjoy. I am going to review the things I read in an attempt to save others from wasting precious reading time on bad books.