Reader's Sketch

Vasiliy Grin

Thomas Maltman

Children’s Literature, Spring 2012

Reader’s Sketch

1/19/2012

The Reader’s Sketch

         My very first memory of a story is when my mom first read to my siblings and me. We were all sitting in my mom’s cozy bed listening to my moms soft voice as she read stories in Russian. The stories that we requested her to read were usually stories of miracles happening to people. We listened in silence to every single word that she said to make sure we don’t miss anything. It was good to hear these stories and enjoyed them every single night.

As a child I was lazy. I hated reading and avoided it as much as I could. I will always remember my mothers screeching voice yelling at me in Russian, “Vasia! Edi Chitaat!”  In English that translates to “Vasiliy! Go read!” I had all the books a child could ever need but I never took advantage of it and now I remember that with great regret.  When I lived in my old house in Blain Minnesota I had all my books in my basement, half on a large bookshelf and the other half scattered around on the floor. I don’t have much memories of me ever reading the books but I do have plenty of me throwing them around and stacking them so I could later knock them all down by throwing a ball at them with my brother or what ever friends where over. I always got in huge trouble for doing it. But that didn’t last very long because my mom said if I ever do anything with the books besides read them she would force me to read them all with her. There was no way in the world I would ever want to read that much so I never throw another ball at the books again.

            When I just started elementary school is when reading started to get more serious and I continued to hate it even more. For me reading was like a chore so I still tried my best to stay way from it. That was extremely hard for me to do at that age because that is when I got my first reading log that I had to follow from my school.  Strangely enough I was actually very motivated to keep up with it, well, maybe that’s because if I read the most out of my class I would get a magic yoyo as a reward. That magic yoyo was one of the first things that I truly would do anything for. I was first introduced to it when my teacher had a speaker come into class to speak about reading. Also he just happened to know how to do yoyo tricks witch amused everyone in the class, even the girls. When he showed the class his first trick, which was called Walk the Dog or something similar to that, that’s when I realized I needed to have that to show off to everyone and get the attention I always loved. To get that yoyo I had to read more minutes then anyone else in my class. Challenge accepted, I thought to my self. So that was a big problem at first because I hated reading and I was not about to read for a few hours a day. What I decided to do for the first day of the log was just completely lie about I just wrote in the times and had my mom sign it and she did. At the time my mother did not know how to read in English so she usually signed everything I handed to her. It worked out perfectly for the first few days until my day caught on, eventually he figured out what the whole log was about and started to monitor my reading. Although now my reading was watched over from a distance I still refused to read. I would sit on my basement couch with my blanket and look through all the books I had over and over again. I did not want to read anything; all I wanted to do is just look at the creative illustrations from page to page and from book to book. The books that amused me the most are the ones by Dr. Sues. The pictures where different from most books, they where so abstract and sparked my imagination. I remember starting at a single page for 10 minutes at a time analyzing it and looking for things I might have previously missed. That is my first memory enjoyable member of books. I never ended up getting that yoyo but I did learn an important lesson about working hard for something that I desired.

            As years went on I learned to finally enjoy books for what they are. I started to love to read through out middle school. My favorite book or book series while I was growing up was called Flight 29 Down by Walter Sorrells. It was a very exciting and mysterious series that I enjoyed to read. I was about a plane that crashed on an Island and the things the group did to survive. These books really shaped my reading future. They showed me that books could be interesting and fun. Although I did start to enjoy books I do not consider myself a life long reader because if I had free time to do something fun or exiting then reading would unfortunately be one of the last things on my list. I plan to continue reading for as long as I can because reading will always bring me enjoyment when I cant do other things. I hope I can start reading more often though so I can grow as a person.