The Land of Fiction

At the beginning of the semester, we talked about the relation between postmodernism and history as fiction. The idea about how fiction can be used as a form of entertainment was brought up, and I agree. When I was in elementary school and especially middle school I would spend countless hours entertaining myself with fictional books. There are the classics that everyone loved, the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Hunger Games series’. A less popular series, The Land of Stories, was one that I was obsessed with. It started when I read all of the books assigned in my 6th grade English class, and was left with a month of class time to spare. My English teacher gave me the first book, and because I had so much free time, I finished it in a weekend. After that I was a machine, just constantly reading the books so that I could finish them before summer vacation started. At the end of the school year, my teacher recommended the Sisters Grimm series, and from there my love for fiction blossomed.

Although I now love reading, it was not always this way. I started to read chapter books as a 1st grader and one book series that almost ruined the world of fiction is Dork Diaries. The majority of my friends at the time were obsessed with the main character, Nikki, and were talking about how they wanted to be like her and thought she was hilarious. So I decided to check out the first two books from the library. I read them over a course of a few weeks and I did not enjoy them, to say the least. I strongly disliked Nikki, and in my opinion she read too much into everything. For example, if her archnemesis blinks her way during lunch, she’d go home that night and write about her “encounter” in her diary. Nonetheless, I kept up and read each book as it was released, until 5th grade when I snapped out of this hypnotism. It was Nikki’s petty attitude and lack of character development that drove me away from reading fiction at the beginning of my literate life. Even now, I was visiting my younger cousins over break and I saw a Dork Diaries book on their shelf, and that left me speechless. For the sake of it, I decided to read it and I was furious! This book, which is the 12th in the series, is almost identical to the ones I was reading as a kid, Nikki still hasn’t changed! Honestly, I’m just happy that as a young child, my love for fiction was able to recover after reading this series.

This summer I worked as an overnight camp counselor, and as the other counselors would hang out and talk at night, I’d hang in a hammock and read a book on my phone. One of my co-workers saw my love of reading and told me she’s never any book for leisure. After our conversation, she started the Divergent series, and so I decided to read them with her, so we could talk about the plot and obsess over the characters together. Even at school, one of my favorite things to do is talk with Courtney, the SSO Office Manager, about the books she’s been reading (because she’s also a bookworm!). Unfortunately because of all the work I get from school, I don’t have much time to read for fun anymore. Although, I will give Ragtime some props for being an assigned book for school because the plot is actually really interesting, and unlike most other fiction books I’ve ever read.