Is Literature Important? My Reading Memoir I am the firstborn of four children, three males and one female. When I was 5 my mother got into trouble with the law which forced us to live with my grandmother, who was adamant about our education. Throughout pre-school to third grade she emphasized on our reading skills, even having a book of bedtime stories and a bookshelf of short stories in our apartment. She read us bedtime stories the majority of the weeknights, and if she forgot then we’d make sure to remind her. My grandmother was positive toward reading and wanted us to have a strong educational foundation yet still encouraged us to pursue our goals and dreams. With this intellectual encouragement I prospered and breezed through reading assignments throughout elementary school. I could read and comprehend many words that my fellow classmates struggled with. I remember having to read completed “decodable” books with the class, each student taking their turn reading a few sentences aloud. I can recall my heart beat increasing and pounding in my chest when it was my turn to read, worried that I may sound stupid by messing up or going too slow and although I got nervous I usually handled myself well. At this time I realized and was grateful that my grandmother had done us a favor by reading with us beforehand. Reading and completing “decodable” books during elementary school definitely reinforced my basic reading comprehension foundation that my grandmother helped to install. When middle school came around I had a great reading foundation and was able to read and comprehend the vast majority of books at our school’s library. During these years I enjoyed reading and felt compulsive to read any type of literature that was in front of me no matter how simple or lame. I would read shop names, billboards, road signs, and even magazines in line at a grocery store. In sixth grade I started to read fictional novels about various sports and completed as many as 8 assigned book reports on them that year. By the end of the seventh grade I was reading at a college freshman level and had read two of the Harry Potter novels, but my feelings toward reading started to spiral downward after middle school as I started to play more with computers. As a