moriah+fletter

Dear Humanities 6 Classmates, I have been reading for over seven increasingly short years and I have read quite thick books and surprisingly little ones. I know there are tons more books I would have wanted to read, or still want to read, even if I have scoured bookshelves and reread many books too. Reading is practically my life, and now telling you “my favorite book is this… and my least favorite book is this…” seems like just the surface. Reading is like sinking a knife into butter; people say it’s easy, but other people ask, “Do you see pictures when you read?” I usually appreciate every book I read, but sometimes finishing a book can be a happy thing. Every time I step into Powell’s and breathe in the book-filled air, a dread comes over me along with a smile. It’s the dread of scouring and dusting the packed, endless bookshelves and trying to find something that isn’t about teenage girls cheerleading, or falling in love with a vampire, or how the world is going to end if two enemies don’t save the world. The good ones always seem to hide; the best ones are the ones that I think about after reading them. I remember when I put all my patience in attempting to read // The Secret Garden, //but I just lost interest at the end of every sentence. That was one of the few books I have never completed. People have presented me with a multitude of books, and a few I haven’t read, but some have turned out less appropriate than what I would prefer, yet I still read them. These books include // Wicked, The Red Tent, and The Time Traveler’s Wife. //In fact, I have even enjoyed more adult books because they have more prominent ideas. I love reading, but I love a goodnight’s sleep a little more, so finding the cozy time to curl up with a book in hand can be difficult. Once I start reading, I’m hard to stop. I read the 600 pages + // Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince // in four short nights. Non-fiction is a tricky subject for me; it can be fascinating, but it can be grueling too. With fact after fact, I find it hard to absorb. I like realistic fiction; it is interesting and not too hard to believe. Sometimes I enjoy a captivating fantasy novel. After I read a fabulous book, I get very jealous that I didn’t write it. I have always adored writing because that’s what leads to a book. My room is full of stories I have started and never finished, prose I have lost hope in, and pointless journal entries. There is something evil about prose. I think it’s that prose takes too long, and they have to make sense. Poetry doesn’t. Poetry is a beautiful jumble of sounds that flow like a waterfall of words. Poetry makes sense to the mind that can rewrite a poem to their personal understanding. I love the swift way words come out to form the poem’s heartbeat. Winning third place in a poetry competition really boosted my confidence in my writing; it wasn’t just my teachers and friends telling me I was a good writer, it was a critic telling me so. Unlike poems, prose has this way of making sense to me in the beginning, and no sense later on. It is a constant war between my sense and the prose. That is when I wish someone really understanding would come and whisper to me the secret of writing. Webbing, mapping, and brainstorming never seem to help unless I’m writing a report with facts that I have already gotten. Writing has always taken me a millennia to do, and so I’ve always hated when I read “…real writers do this…” and “…good writers do this…”. If writing takes me so long, imagine me attempting to write a book! My dream is to have written a worthwhile novel and see it in a bookstore in the check-out line. Someday I hope to qualify myself as a real writer, not one who writes for fame or fortune. I hope to fulfill my dream of completing a novel, one that is defying expectations. I wish to read many books that make me think about the world beyond my home, or ones that make me realize the world isn’t just in front of us, it’s in us. I hope to continue scouring bookshelves for as long as I can. Sincerely, Moriah