Literacy Narrative

The literacy narrative was a great way to start off the semester.  It gave me the chance to share my reading background with the professor, as well as reflect on the book that have made an impression on me over the years.  It was great to think back about books that I read young and will always remember: Ender's Game, the Lord of the Rings, 1984, and Brave New World, as well as many others.  I have included the full text of my literacy narrative below:

     I have been an avid reader since middle school.  The earliest books I can remember enjoying are Ender's Game and The Hobbit.  These books were fascinating to me because they allowed me to escape the mundane and sometimes unpleasant world of the American middle school student and experience fantastic realms where adventure is a given.  I would view my reading during this period as a sort of escapism.  My positive experience with The Hobbit led me to take on The Lord of the Rings as an 8th grader.
    Although my younger years as a reader were dominated by science fiction and fantasy, the two books that influenced me the most as a reader were Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell.  These books appealed to me in high school, a time when I was heavily questioning the structures of the society I was living in.  These books taught me that literature can be just as destabilizing and rebellious as the punk music that I loved so much at the time.  Another book that I loved during this time was Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man.  The introduction to this book affected me in a profound way:  so much that I have remembered it ever since.
     I studied philosophy my first time around in college, which introduced me to such fictional works as The Stranger and The Fall by Albert Camus, The Brothers Karamozov and Demons by Dostoyevsky, and The Trial and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.  Although these books are not commonly used in the high-school curriculum (I certainly did not encounter them until later in life), I think that most of them would have value to certain high-school students.  With the exception of Dostoyevsky, most of these books are written in a very straightforward, easy-to-understand diction.  The complexities of these novels lie in their subtle implications, which might be only partially understood by high-school students.  To encounter these ideas early, however, would be beneficial to many students.  Philosophy is all to often (read: almost always) overlooked in secondary education, and the introduction of books like these would allow students to encounter philosophical ideas early on without the benefit of a high school philosophy class, which is almost always absent in America.
    In my later life, I have continued to read avidly.  in my twenties I discovered such authors as Tom Robbins, David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, and Phillip K. Dick.  I would have to say that my favorite novel at the moment is Infinite Jest, although Philip Dick's Valis and Vonnegut's Slapstick are right up there.  I hope that I have herein provided a general overview of my reading background.  If there is one value that I see in reading, it is the access to an infinity of ideas inherited through writing and thought, in a way that movies and television can never really approach.