23

Day 23: Your favorite book.

I know it's written for kids, and honestly, I read this for the first time when I was in (I think) fourth grade. I got through it in two hours--mostly due to the fact that my reading level (according to the Accelerated Reading software) was somewhere around 10th grade back then.

But I read it over and over and over. I checked it out from the school library so many times that the librarian gave me the paperback copy of it. And I read that copy until both covers fell off. I wish I still had that copy, but I think I might have lost it in a move or something.

The Giver began my love of futuristic dystopian literature. It was the first book I ever read that, even though the premise of the book is far-fetched, I could still relate it to many real-life instances. As I aged, I was able to see glimpses of this book in the government, in school, in stories on the news.

At one point, I could almost read through it without the book. This was when I was on a bus route that was over an hour long. I spent two hours a day on a bus. I didn't have a GameBoy or a CD player (most of the time, I just didn't have batteries. We were ridiculously poor when I was a kid), but that was okay most of the time because I loved to read. I still love to read, but I don't actually do it. I mean, I don't read for pleasure like I used to. I have a library card... I got it four or five years ago and I've used it once or twice.

That's pretty sad, when you consider that during my first two years of high school, I was reading seven or eight books a week. By the end of my sophomore year, I had read almost everything in the library that I was interested in, and I was doing a lot of rereading my favorites, or books that I had mixed feelings about the first time around. Maybe that's why my brain is like an encyclopedia. Maybe that's why I feel less and less articulate every day.

So maybe, when I survive the photo challenge, I should find a book challenge. Then I'm forcing myself to read and write intelligently on what I read. Mrs. Wrampe would be proud.