Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be free forever.” If you know how to read and write, from then on the sky is the limit. It can help you expand your mind, your critical thinking, and make you see the world from a different perspective. Many people take literacy for granted and have no idea how many other worlds you can create in your mind just by reading a book or writing in a journal. I have some literacy experiences that have helped shape who I am today. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I think most people of our generation were read “The Giving Tree” by our parents when we were young. This book was an important part of my childhood because it was one of the few times I bonded with my father. My parents divorced when I was little and my mother got primary custody, so I only saw my father every other weekend. He and I watched The Little Mermaid every morning during breakfast and in the evening he read The Giving Tree to me. It was a paperback with a plastic cover. On the front cover was a drawing of a tree giving one of its apples to a child. The story of the little boy and the tree he gives is quite heartbreaking. The boy, even as an old man, returns to the tree every single day to take something from it. When there are no more apples, the leaves, branches and possibly the entire stump are taken. The end is just the old man sitting on the stump with nothing left to take from it. Even as a child I understood the moral of the story. There's a whole controversy about whether the book is about selfless love or an abusive relationship. In a way, it's both. The tree shows selfless love by allowing it to take everything it has to make the boy happy and fulfilled in life. The book also shows the effects of an abusive relationship by perceiving the child as the aggressor. He keeps taking and taking things from the tree until there is only a stump left with nothing left. The boy takes everything for granted and doesn't realize what he had until he leaves. This book will ultimately change the way I view relationships. While selfless love is a wonderful thing, you can't have a healthy relationship with someone if you both don't put in the extra effort. I'm so grateful to have had that book read to me as a child. It created many great memories with my father and taught me a lot about life. I never read for fun until I got to high school. I read quite a few books in high school because I had a lot of free time, but one in particular stood out to me. My best friend, Mikara, recommended that I read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. He had a copy that he lent me. It was hardback and the cover was gray and black, like something out of a horror movie; I couldn't wait to read it. The book is about a boy who, after a horrible family tragedy, follows clues that lead him to an abandoned orphanage on a Welsh island. This book really opened my mind to a lot of creativity and imagination, because it made me think about images more deeply than I normally would. There are many different characters in the book, such as a girl who can float, a boy with two heads, and a girl who can spit fire from her hands. Every time I opened the book to read it, it was as if I dived into another world I had created and left every detail of reality behind. I just remember that the book really inspired me and had an impact on my mind. I thought reading was boring and considered it a chore, but when.”