Ever since I can remember, I haven’t liked reading. In fact, when I was younger I despised it. When we had to report reading logs in grade school, I would lie to my mother about how often I read my book. I was often lost and confused in class, because I couldn’t contribute my opinion on the books characters or plot due to the fact that I didn’t read the book. This struggle continued into middle school and high school, but I could come up with something on the spot from skimming the book assigned.
This was my motivation for my new series, “Must-Reads for the Non-Reader.” As it turned out, I didn’t like reading because I had a reading disability. My eyes could not differentiate the lines of text in a standard book. I would often wound up at the end of a sentence I already read, or didn’t even begin. It was so frustrating, because people associated my lack of skill in reading with incompetence. I have always had a hard time reading for an assignment, so I never attempted reading for pleasure. In school, I was required to read sometimes very lengthy novels that didn’t interest me.
Now that I’m in college, I realized that I could start reading with alternative methods. This can include audiobooks, poetry, news articles, etc. I know how hard it is to read a small printed, 300+ page novel for an assignment. If it’s hard for me to read for an assignment, I’m most likely not going to go out of my way to read in my freetime. This series of “Must-Reads for the Non-Reader” is composed of very short inspirational autobiographies, books of poetry, books with many illustrations to engage the reader, etc. The goal of this series is to help people who have a hard time reading, like myself. This is for people who want to learn how to read for pleasure, for people who have short attention spans and for people who don’t have time to read lengthy novels.
Stay tuned for my first book review in a couple of weeks! Spoiler alert: She’s an up and coming author who self-published her first book.