"The Price of Reading Is Eternal Vigilance" Blog #2

The article "The Price of Reading Is Eternal Vigilance," discusses a friend of the author's experiences with reading. It is a story about how a man in his golden years is "just learning how to read." He talks about his feelings when he first learned how to read. Then,it shares with us how he started to make reading his own, and that through interpretation and subjective opinion the reader's role can be, at times, more difficult than the writer's.

The article makes me think back to a time when I considered reading to be boring. A time when I was immersed into watching television and movies, and I succumbed to the world of video games. Like a large portion of our society, I was very much into visual interactions. Sadly, this overtaking lasted into my late-twenties. To be more specific, visual interactions overtook my life until six months ago.

Even though, I had read about a dozen books in high school. Only because of the requirements of a reading class I had during freshman year. I will admit, I was not too enthusiastic about even having to take a "reading class." Books just did not "strike a cord" in me. But unfortunately, I had to take the class, because it was one of the last ones available.So,the first few weeks of class I only read short, quick, and easy books. We had to take a test based off each book we read, and the first handful I completed I scored well on. "Alright easy 'A"' I thought, "more time for games."

I was wrong. Shortly thereafter, I had realized the testing was not only based off the knowledge of the book you read, but the level of reading it was, and the length of it. The shorter books were not worth as many points for the class, so I would have had to read more of them to equal the same amount points of one larger book. If I wanted to pass the class. Taking that new information into mind, I had decided to read some larger texts for the rest of the class. Somehow, this resulted in me being the most accelerated reader in my high school. In spite of my achievement in ninth grade, I did not do much reading after that.

Here it is, a little more than a decade later. Finally, I am acquiring an interest in reading. Perhaps, if not for my curiosity about different life values, as well as my profound attraction to the teachings of the Dalai Lama, I would still consider reading to be boring. Thankfully though, it is quite the opposite and the majority of my visual interactions now come from within and not from a television screen