Meet the Reader!

Hello everyone! My name is Heather and I’m the reader behind “Let’s Get Literature”.

A little bit about me; I love to read, obviously, I’m an English and communication major at Southern Utah University, and I work for my school's news organization. Outside of reading and writing, I love to play fantasy football, watch reality TV, and bake.

Many of my fellow book nerds grew up loving to read, but I definitely was not that way. In fact I classified myself as a total non-reader— I hated it! But the truth was, reading was just hard for me.

I have ADHD, which affects my life in a lot of ways, but at it's core it is a neurodevelopmental disorder which means the way I learn and take in information is a little bit different than everyone else. So as a kid trying to read the way everyone around me was reading, I found a lot of difficulty retaining the information that I was taking in.

In a technical sense, I was above my grade level when it came to reading. I could understand sentences, even paragraphs just fine, but in larger text, it just felt like pieces of a puzzle I couldn’t fit together. It was frustrating, confusing, and honestly made me feel stupid compared to my peers.

In my middle school, we tracked reading through Accelerated Reader points by taking tests on the books we had read, and based on how well we understood the book and the book's difficultly level, we would receive a certain amount of points. Not only would we need reach a minimum AR points to pass English class, but there was a chart in the hallway that tracked how many we had as an initiative for kids to read more— talk about embarrassing!

In 6th grade I was in desperate need of AR points, and had recently watched and enjoyed the new Hunger Games movie, so I figured if I checked the Hunger Games out from the library, “read” it during class, then took the test based off what I knew from the movie, I’d be able to get quite a few points.

And even though I hated to read, I was still high on my love for that movie, and excited to experience its plot all over again through the book. 

Flipping through the pages of Susanne Collins’ masterpiece, something clicked. The words were more than letters on a page, they became scenes, characters, plots, and themes. I understood literature in a way I never had before, and most importantly, I couldn’t wait to read about what happened next.

When I treat reading as a function, my brain obtains information, but it doesn’t absorb it. Reading the Hunger Games helped me realize that reading is entirely possible for me, I just have to love it. 

I see reading a book as a sort of magic. It transforms you somewhere else, it opens doors, it creates realities. But none of that is possible without a sense of excitement, and for someone like me, it is completely essential.

By the time I entered high school I went from classifying myself as a non-reader to a booklover. I got an internship at my local library, became my school’s English and Literature sterling scholar, had dreams of being an author, and now, I’m majoring in creative writing, which is the complete opposite of where I thought I’d end up.

I wanted to create this blog for people like me, who are driven by passion when they pick up a book. I have grown to love the classics, but I wouldn't be where I am with reading without young adult dystopian trilogies or even the fake dating trope, and I am sick of the shame surrounding "low brow" literature!

As I see it, reading has two purposes: to learn and to enjoy. Instead of sacrificing one for the other, let’s enjoy all aspects of literature. Let’s get ‘lit’erature!

So follow along as I review books, authors, and genres, get excited about reading, and maybe even learn a thing or two.