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My earliest memory involving reading was in preschool. My teacher, Ms. Z, would always read books to the class while we were all lined up in our chairs that made a semicircle. I remember being so infatuated and going home to tell my parents about it. Then, when my parents realized how much I loved reading, they went out and bought similar books so they could read them to me before bed as well. Sometimes, my older sister Emmaly, would also read her books to me.

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The first series I remember reading was at the end of 1st grade. I LOVED Geronimo Stilton. I thought his character was so funny because he was always nervous about things, just like how I was as a kid, yet he kept getting into adventures with Thea, Trap, and Benjamin and they always had the most fun.

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"Real courage is not being without fear, but confronting it whilst being aware of your limits and trying to overcome them"

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Where the Sidewalk Ends By Shel Silverstein 

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Where the Sidewalk Ends By Shel Silverstein 

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Reading his books is where my love for poetry began. The first one I ever read was Where the Sidewalk Ends and I checked it out of my school library. After finishing the book within the week, I returned it and borrowed another. I loved reading the short but meaningful passages in his books and finally, when I was done reading all of his books that were in my library, I made my parents bring me to the bookstore to buy the ones I hadn’t read.

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“Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child.”

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I vividly remember reading this book in 5th grade with my teacher. She had pulled aside me and another two of my friends and told us that she wanted to work with us specifically on annotating and reading this book because she saw that we were more advanced. We spent a very long time deeply annotating each page looking for the symbols and underlying themes. Throughout reading this book, I found a love for annotating and reading realistic fiction and started reading more of her books.

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“Don't judge a man before you walk two moons in his moccasins.”

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I read this novel two summers ago and the lesson it conveyed, stuck with me. This novel was about a girl who had her whole life changed by a decision to change from her old faction, Abnegation to her new one, Dauntless. This book is important to me because it taught me that our decisions are valuable and also opened my eyes to the ways in which each individual impacts society and plays their own important part.

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“I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and kind, and honest.”

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My mom is my biggest reading mentor. Even though she does not read physical books, every night before bed on her Kindle she reads at least 100 pages of her book. Whether she reads for 30 minutes before bed because she's tired or if she stays up so late reading for 3 hours because the book is so good, she will always be reading at some point, at some time in the day. It has become a part of her routine.  Her dedication to reading inspires me to read more books out of my comfort zone. Even when I am dreading the annotations, she makes me look at it in a different light because she always says that by the end of the novel, even if you didn’t like reading and annotating it, there is a lesson you can learn from it.

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"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

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When I was doing the summer reading assignment this year for AP Lit with Beloved, I realized that I needed to focus less on the plot, and more on the underlying message. This meant I had to focus on form, structure, and most importantly, diction. I had to keep asking myself how these specific words added to my understanding of the reading which was completely different from how I used to read to merely understand the plot.

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I read this book one year ago and got a lot of good lessons on my worldview from it. This novel was about a man and their descent into severe depression and addiction. Through the narrator’s struggle with feeling like an outcast, I began to see mental illness and the harsh reality of the human condition. Ultimately, No Longer Human, is a searing examination of alienation that provides the lesson of finding purpose, belonging, and the importance of community in order to keep one’s mind healthy. This reading has stuck with my ever since I read it and it always reminds me that you don’t know what someone is going through at home and that its important to be kind to everyone.

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“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.”

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I have never connected with a book more than I did with this one. This book inspired me in so many ways and gave me a new perspective on life. Yusura was a Muslim girl just like me. In the beginning, she explained our religion and the things that were normal in her family which were also in mine. I felt like just in the first few chapters I was able to connect with her solely based that we shared a religion. In the books I had read in the past, most characters or people were Christian so I never connected with them on a religious level. As the book went on, reading about her struggles and hardships with having to move and make sacrifices at such a young age made me realize how good of a life I have. It made me realize that I need to stop complaining about the little things and be grateful for the things and people that I do have in my life because you never know when it will be your last time. Not only this, but this book had such a large impact on my life it definitely marked the biggest shift in my reading journey.

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“We are not only refugees. We are like everyone in the world. We can do something, achieve something. We didn´t choose to leave our homelands.”

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Yusara Mardini: From Refugee to Swimming Icon

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Yusara Mardini: From Refugee to Swimming Icon

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Yusra Mardini has been swimming in Syria since she was a child - until the war began. In 2015, she flees with her family from the bombing. During the crossing of the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, the overcrowded rubber dinghy threatens to capsize. Yusra and her sister Sara swim together to save the boat and with it many lives. The family is stranded in Berlin. After the club Wasserfreunde Spandau 04 takes notice of her, she participates in the Refugee Team at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She also competed in Tokyo in 2021. Since then, it has been quieter for Yusra Mardini, who is currently studying in the USA.

However, she continues her tireless efforts on behalf of refugees during her studies. She has already received numerous awards for her social commitment, such as the Bambi (German media award) in the "Silent Heroes" category, "The Girls Award" from the UNICEF Global Goal Awards and the "Made For More Award" in the Hero category. She was also included in TIME magazine's list of the 30 most influential teenagers.

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Yusra Mardini: From refugee to swimming icon

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In 2015, swimmer Yusra Mardini fled the war in Syria, saving the lives of many people in the process. After participating in the 2016 and 2021 Olympic Games, she became a UNHCR ambassador and an icon for refugees. Her story is encouraging and inspiring. You can experience Yusra live at ISPO Munich 2023.

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Another reading mentor in my life would be my dad. Unlike my mom, he did not read long books and novels, but he did read news articles everyday. Whether it be about things in my school or what was going on politically, if he ever found something interesting, he would copy the link and send it to our family group and always say, "please take some time to read this article". He would never share something he didn't think would be important to our lives and our future. Reading all of these long articles prompted me to want to AP Seminar because I knew that was what the class was all about. I knew it would be more in depth but I loved being more educated in any subject that I could.

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This year, I was enrolled in AP Seminar which is a class that is solely based on researching and writing papers. I had to become comfortable with reading a number of different studies conducted by people from everywhere. By the end of the year, what I used to dread so much, now comes easy to me. I am able to read a full article about a stem-related topic that is very advanced and find the claims and evidence that would support my paper. Now I would say I am a much better reader and writer because of this.

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In my sophomore year of highschool, I was exposed to Gothic and Horror fiction and it was a whole new tone and mood I had never read before. It was dark, dramatic, and picturesque unlike anything I had ever read before

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Reading my first digital novel was a big shift. Sophomore year, my teacher explained that as a class we were going to read and annotate Dracula on a pdf, on Kami. I thought at first maybe it would be easier and take me less time to read and annotate, which were both true by the ending. However, I hated the bright screen on my face for over an hour. I felt like it took away the whole part of reading and the satisfaction you get when you flip a page that makes you one page closer to the end of the chapter. I didn’t get that same pleasure with just a scroll down. Not only this, but it wasn't like I was reading the book on a Kindle, I was reading it on my laptop on a pdf. Overall, the experience was awful especially because Dracula was such a long and dreadful novel. However, it did make me appreciate reading out of a book a lot more than I did.

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"I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

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My biggest challenge in reading is that oftentimes if I do not “love” the book or if I get bored to just start skipping a couple of pages until I find a spot that's interesting again. I know this is really bad because I am missing parts of the plot and I know every page is important, but if I don’t I'll completely lose focus and want to stop reading altogether.

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My favorite thing about reading is that when I get really focused on the book and just keep reading, I love seeing how much time passes by. When I’m reading, my sense of time is completely gone and it never feels like as much time as it says, has actually passed. Regardless, I love getting so sucked into the book because everything else doesn’t matter and my sole focus is on the book.

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My reading goal, specifically for this summer, is to read more than four books outside of the summer assignment. Last summer I read three books outside of the school assignments, so I just want to read one more than last year. I would also really want to read more about things that I do not know about rather that what I already do know. I want to expand my reading genres and try reading genres I’ve never heard of before because I love a good surprise.

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Please feel free to comment on my Reading History Timeline!