I'm Going to Read, Wake Me Up in Five Minutes

In fourth grade I started playing Alto saxophone for my grade school band. Three years later I learned Baritone saxophone for my middle school band. In another year I joined a choir. By the end of high school I had been in six different bands, learned to play several instruments, joined two different choirs, taken multiple music theory class, and starred in more than a dozen musicals. My love for the arts started early in my life, my mother is an artist and my father is a musician and a head designer for a stationary company. The arts were alive in my household, jazz was usually played during dinners, my mom would paint a few times a week, and my dad seemed to always spend at least an hour a night fine tuning his classical guitar skills. Both of my parents read nightly and they taught me to read, as well as paint, play music, and appreciate the arts that surrounded me. Their training brought me to love the arts: painting, theater, and music, but reading books in particular was never appealing to me. Reading is not hard but it does not bring me the joy that I see others receiving from it. Is that reading was not prominent enough in my upbringing or was it rather that the society surrounding me did not influence me to read?
When I was younger I used to read more. I was infatuated about the Harry Potter book series, reading a few of the books multiple times. I had a very good relationship with my middle school librarian, he offered me the chance to read new books that he got into the library and I would later tell him what I thought of the books. But once I entered high school and my schedule became increasingly busy the amount of reading that I did for fun dropped off. The graphs of figure 1 by the National Center for Education Sta...

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...d that I have fallen in line with many statistics. I am a Digital Native; I spend more of my day in front of a laptop or cell phone screen than anything else. The only reason I pick up a book is because I need to in order to get a good grade in a class. I am still involved in the arts, just like my parents raised me, but what I have realized is that the television that I watch is not brain numbing shows like Honey Boo Boo or Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but rather shows that show character depth and development, television shows and movies that stand alone as art forms that can be respected; television that resembles books. In starting this essay I felt guilty that I do not read as much as I used to, I will give reading a second chance, however now after analyzing my reading habits I feel better with the decision of putting down the book and opening up Netflix.