Page 1 Brenton Ellison Professor Jessica Schley English 1101 September 4, 2013 Looking back into my past and

thinking about which people and which events have shaped my outlook and viewpoint of reading and writing, I realize how much has gone into my literary history. Books and authors, family and friends, writing assignments and classroom novels, summer reading programs and book fairs have all been the things which have ultimately created my current relationship with the written word. The farthest memory concerning a book I can bring back into my mind comes from kindergarten. There was one particular Arthur book that I read over and over again every time we had the opportunity to read. The covers were missing and the book was in pretty bad overall shape, but all of that went into the sentimental connection that I made with the book. The story was about a time when Arthur got the chickenpox, a pretty standard childrens book plot, and I loved to read this book, even though I couldnt actually read, not fully at least. My method was that when I read the book, I would look at the pictures, and, knowing some of the words on the page, I would make up what was going on in the scene. Which is why, when I started to gain in my ability to read and no longer had the need to make up parts of the story, I was confused when the story as I read it and the story as I remembered it did not match up. This was the first connection with a book that I ever made in my life.

Page 2 But after my early interactions with the printed word, it wasnt long before I became acquainted with the entity that was to become an integral part of how I lived my life and how I thought of the world, the internet. My parents came home one day with a new Compaq computer and my world was changed forever. This new device could display any kind of information I wanted, in any amount I wanted, at any time I wanted. As a child, maybe 5 years old, a computer meant to me games. But as I got older, the familiar Yahoo! home screen, with its display of the latest headlines and bits of news that would be most relevant to the average person, became the jumping off point for sports articles, movie reviews, obscure Google searches, and endless Wikipedia pages. Had this event not occurred, although looking around today I think it was inevitable to occur, my newsfeed would be confined to the relatively few books available in my local library and whatever programs the networks decided to air. It is because of the internet that I can take such control of my information intake and can make my range of exposure as wide and as varied as I choose. The first and foremost literary sponsors in my life were my parents. From the very earliest age, they were strongly encouraging me to read the bible and other bible-based literature, and, as one might expect, these books and the incredible religious pressure poured onto me by my parents affected absolutely every aspect of my life. There was no corner of my life that was left untouched by the faith of my parents. It dictated what TV shows and movies I could watch, what books I could read, and what friends I could keep. I dont think we read the bible in any particular order, but over the years, flipping through all those scriptures and flipping through them repeatedly, I guess I must have read almost the entire book four or five

Page 3 times over. I couldnt really give too many in-depth descriptions of the characters and histories laid out in that text, but I certainly got the gist of the message. It was the bible, and my parents interpretation of it, that dictated my various outlooks and paradigms. It was, until recently, because of this influence that my outlook of the world was, I can now admit, decidedly narrow. All cultures and all ethnicities of the world essentially boiled down into two groups, the believers and the nonbelievers, and anyone who fell on the wrong side of that argument was very far from Gods good graces. All other belief systems, even other interpretations of biblical texts, I viewed as being just foolishness. But as I began to develop a more independent mind and started to place the things I was being taught in a critical light, my mind began to open. In a relatively short period of time, I became much more accepting of other peoples religious beliefs, understanding why and how they believed what they believed and respecting those reasons. Because of this new, accepting attitude, I started to feel like a genuine, functioning member of the human family, rather than just viewing myself as an outsider, looking down on the beliefs and opinions of others as I was before. But outside those major influences were other things, other books and other reading material that shaped me in more subtle ways. I can remember one series of books particularly well. The series was called The Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. On my own, I probably never would have even noticed the books, but, in elementary school, it was the favorite read among my circle of friends. I was a little resistant at first to join in, but eventually, I went to the library and checked out book number 8. It didnt take me long to realize that I loved the book, and was soon racing my friends to the library to get a particular book in the

Page 4 series that none of us had read yet. Looking back, books were a bonding force among my group of friends, and actually, all of my recreational reading was in some way or another a reflection of the current interests of the group. At some point in the school year, my friends and I became absolutely obsessed with aliens and UFOs. The school library had a special shelf which carried all the subject matter of scary stories, the paranormal, unexplained occurrences and phenomena, as well as alien and UFO activity. While the religious pressures of my parents prohibited me from de-shelving any of the paranormal collection, I was more than happy to delve into the unnerving stories of alien encounters and strange night-sky sightings. I eventually became so engrossed in this material, that I started to become afraid to go down dark hallways in my house alone. This fear grew worse and worse until finally, on a weekend trip to the mountains, I looked out my bedroom window one night, scanning over the stars, and saw one light in particular that was moving in a circular pattern. Of course this couldnt have been any plane and any other reasonable explanation escaped me. For the next week, I was terrified. I would sit in class, my eyes dilated and unblinking, my mind unable to think of anything but the aliens. Eventually my mother became irritated with this and started to tell me things like youll have to read as many other books as youve read of these alien books if you want to get them out of your head. But eventually she showed me on a map that there was an airport near the cabin we were staying in and that someone must have been moving a light around on a tower or something. Although I knew that probably wasnt the explanation, I would have taken anything at that point to break the power those books held over me. Needless to say, once I had returned to

Page 5 normal, I never checked out another alien book for the rest of the time I was in elementary school. Another element of elementary school that deeply affected my reading was a program called the Accelerated Reader program. With this program, you would read a book, and then you could take a computer test on the book, and depending on how many questions you answered correctly, you would receive all or some portion of the points the book was valued at, and that value depended on the difficulty and reading level of the book. It was a point of competition between my friends and I to see who could rack up the most AR points in a school year, because the top three students would receive a trophy at the end of the year. Besides my friends, this program was one of the major factors that influenced what books I read and how many books I read. One of the first things I would look for as soon as I picked up a book was how many AR points the book was valued at, in fact, there were several books, Anne of Green Gables being one of them, that I would otherwise never have even considered reading if it were not for the fact that they carried so many AR points with them. Although I rarely made it past the first twenty pages of one of these higher-level books, the influence was there. That program and the incentives it offered were enough to steer me away from books I would naturally have gravitated towards and into other, more difficult pieces of literature. Often, it was the sole reason I was making any effort at all to go to the library.