When I was
young, I loved to read! I would always stay up late just to finish “the chapter”,
which always resulted in finishing the whole book in one night. I would read
with the light of my flashlight, because my mother turned off the lights at
night to make sure we went to sleep. My father also read Harry Potter to us when
the series just came out, this is why I liked books; it brought all of us
together and was very exciting. In primary school, I had gotten to the fastest
reading speed in third grade (groep 3) and read 5 books per week on average.
When I went
to high school, I loved to read Harry Potter by myself. I have also partially read
the series in English. Unfortunately, it was not allowed to do a book report as
it was not written by a Dutch writer. A lot of books I was interested in were
either not on the list because it wasn’t literature according to the teacher or
they were written by a foreign writer. Having to read books I didn’t want to
read and not being able to read the books I liked caused me to not like reading
at all anymore.
The only
things I read nowadays are books I have to study or posts on the internet. I
think it is a shame that wanting me to read resulted to this. I have been
thinking a lot about picking up reading again because I travel a lot with
public transport, but every time I pick up a book I fall asleep whilst reading
it. I think youth literature might be helpful to find the fun in reading once
again, because we can also read children’s books, which are a lot of fun most
of the time.
