how literature has impacted me

When I hear the word “literature”, I tend to think of things like enormous text books filled with ordinary short stories and boring poetry. However, literature cannot be condensed into one giant text book sent by all English teachers to torture their students. Literature can be an amazing thing if you look in the right places. Whether it is in a simple poem that speaks to you every time you read it or in a series of large books that make you feel every part of it, literature speaks, in some way, to everyone. Throughout high school, I had a fairly good relationship with reading. I was always open to starting a new series or reading a five page poem. My English teacher sophomore year made English my favourite subject. Some of my peers hated her strict schedule and did not appreciate the method in which she taught us to love literature as she did. I was said to leave her class by the time junior year rolled around, and I was even more depressed when I found out just how one teacher could butcher a single subject. My last two years of high school English were more than enough to put an entire community to sleep. And when I say that this teacher completely ruined my love for literature, I mean it. Every day was the same old routine of reading poems and short stories that held no meaning. I never thought one semester could be so dull. Once I had finished high school, I was glad to be rid of the monotonous schedule of tending to poorly written….crap. I didn’t start really reading again until I went to work for my dad; the work load is pretty light and I often find myself with no papers to file or counters to clean. The days seemed endless with a touch of Facebook here and Myspace there. To backtrack a little bit, my cousin has been giving me books for Christmas for years now, and I had already read every single book known to my house, so I decided to dig into the pile of somewhat interesting looking books. To no avail, my search for a good book dwindled down to me reading a few pages in the middle to see if the book was any good. When I started reading a series of British books about a teenage girl, I was immediately hooked. The way the author wrote had me laughing at every sentence. You know that feeling when you change the channel, and on a commercial you suddenly realize that you are missing part of an awesome movie? That’s the best way I can describe my passion for reading. Nowadays, when I hear the word literature, I don’t think of crappy reading assignments from a stiff text book dirtied with doodles and the occasional ‘I hate poetry’ scrabbled next to a sonnet, I think of a giant novel filled with scenarios and passionate characters that I never want to stop reading. Literature is my escape when my own world is too boring. I fear that my life without a good book would be meaningless. I love literature (books in particular as you may have noticed). However, I still get the same feeling of satisfaction from reading a poem that makes me swoon. I hope that this class will teach me a greater appreciation for every type of literature, not just books; although I am not entirely spent on the idea of finding another amazing novel.