Jaylen King

Dalton

English 110

Lit Narrative 

I couldn’t tell you when I learned to read, I can’t tell you what books my mom bought or how exactly she got me to read in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always been able to sound out words. I can’t think of a time when I couldn’t, I only give you stories from my mom about how much me and my sisters where a pain to get to be quiet,How we’d run up the stairs to papa’s house and pretend that where were sleep or How we’d slack of and ask papa to read the book to us when we didn’t feel like reading which was all the time. How every time she got me and my sisters to read or shut up for even a few minutes “Just one wrong move would set off your mouths to start talking and yall always waited till as I sat down”. A quote from my mom herself. But that wouldn’t be fun to write and also would be disgusting, Fat F if I turned it in so instead what I can tell you is how I learned to love writing because of reading. 

I Hated reading when I was younger. I used to literally run all the way across the hallway and up the stairs to my grandparent’s apartment. As soon as I heard “Time to read Jay” from my mom I was gone. My papa was very smart and extremely patient. He knew almost every day that I would come running after my mom came home and tried to make me read so he’d open the door after Seven so I could just run right in and turn on nick toons or play the xbox. When I was six I was genuinely scared of my mom at times. Not because she did anything to harm me, I was just a very sensitive kid and my mom was just a loud person by nature. But my mom knew this very well and tried her hardest to keep her voice down and would make my sisters do the same,So a lot of my dislike of reading had a lot to do with the fact my mom was forcing me to do it. My grandpa saw this and him being him he decided to do everything in his power to get me to enjoy reading. 

My favorite show at the time was the Teenage mutant ninja turtles so he ended up buying me one graphic novel that was The complete first season of the show plus four mini chapters four each one of the turtles. That book that I still have to this day. The book was basically shaped like a long brick definingly not recommended for a seven-year-old to be lugging around in his book bag but I took that book everywhere, I read it beginning to end not skipping a page, Looking back at the book now the art was very mediocre and the extra stories they put in where horrible except one but it had me glued.

 I read the book everywhere and anywhere I could in my mom’s car, In class, At lunch, After school, During summer, at cookouts  in the house wherever whenever. One day in the fifth grade, one of my favorite teachers and honestly a real role model for me was an english teacher at my school who did after school poetry. She treated everyone of her students like her own child and was a very helpful teacher constantly giving me book recommendations and suggestions to help me enjoy my reading, Eventually Ms. Smith saw that I had read this book almost two times in her class alone and recommended the Amulet series to me since she had seen that I had a big interest in graphic novels. And That’s when my imagination went wild. Amulet not only had in my opinion at the time the best art I’d seen in a graphic novel, they also had characters with superpowers with limited but meaningful dialogue and a serious tone. I started imagining my own characters and my own Worlds and settings even though my drawing was awful. It really didn’t matter. My imagination made it look exactly how I wanted it too. Eventually I found other things I fell in love with like the Bone series Yu-Gi-oh, Dragon ball, Adventure Time, FullMetal Alchemist and a bunch of other things that I love to this day and that all steamed from my grandpa buying me a stupid graphic novel for thirty five dollars.