Texts, and all that entails.

Reading is one of those strange things that every single person seems to do differently. To be able to actually absorb what I’m reading, and understand what’s going on, I can’t have silence whatsoever. I have a habit of playing music while I read, for the sake of background noise. If it’s silent, I find that I easily find myself just staring off into space rather than focusing on my book.
I absolutely love to read, and I have loved it since I was young and I learned how. However, I’m one of those picky readers who can’t just pull out a book and read at the drop of a hat. I have to be in the right sort of environment, or, like I said earlier, I become easily distracted. As strange as this sounds, I read best in the car. With music on, and other people making small talk in the back seat, it’s absolutely perfect. I’m pretty horrible at reading in groups, overall. I like to discuss books with other people to see what their opinions were, and to talk about all the things that went on within the story. But I’ve always hated the whole concept of going around the class with everyone reading a paragraph. I was always the kid who would get bored by how slowly others were reading, skip ahead and read it on my own, then miss my turn when it came and need to be shouted at.
I feel like my approach to reading has changed quite a bit through high school, but has stayed fairly consistent into college. I had this fantastic English teacher for two different years in high school, and she taught me everything I feel I would ever need to learn about reading and understanding texts. She taught me how to search for symbolism and recognize how that could relate to the author or to humanity in general. She taught me how to recognize motifs and every other kind of writing convention under the sun. She was one of those teachers who could make you see a sentence in a book five different ways, through interpreting it differently. Coming into college after having that kind of teacher has been fairly easy. For me, as well, the lines between college and high school were blurred a little because I spent the majority of my senior year taking college courses at our branch of OSU. I took a basic English 101 class there, and it transferred here as English 111. This makes it a little difficult to say how things have changed between high school and Miami University, since this is my first English class on this particular campus. But from high school to my PSEO class, to here, things haven’t changed much, as far as I can tell.
As far as the broad topic of “texts”, and the different things we defined it as, I would have to say my favorite medium is music. Music has always held this sort of allure to me. I’ve always admired people who could write songs that held such amazing meaning, yet still flowed seamlessly with the melody. It’s difficult to put together coherent thoughts and have them sound beautiful. Let alone trying to set them to music. Besides that, music is just one of those things that really hit you where it matters. Reading is great, but a lot of times that can become mundane. Listening to music, however, never gets old.