Since I was young, I like to read. It relaxes me and disconnects me from the worries of daily life for a while. There have been stages in my life where it was difficult to find time to read, and that was when all my children were young. The first book that came into my hands was given by a friend in junior high. The name of the book is Cien Años de Soledad by the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After that book, I read everything he wrote. Another of my favorite writers is Isabel Allende who wrote that famous book La Casa de Los Espiritus. I have to confess that all these books I read are in Spanish.
The first book I read in English was last semester in English 009 with Professor Brooks and the book was On Writing by the author Stephen King. It was not easy, I had to underline almost the entire book and look in the dictionary for many words that I did not know the meaning of. At first, it was a bit stressful but I managed to connect with the writer and at the end, I felt that I learned to lose my fear and read and write in English. The advice in the book was practical, some of the ones I remember were, taking writing as an adventure, not limiting your thoughts, and finding that special place to read and write. King, with that black humor that defines him, just wanted readers to relax when writing and that writing was like boarding on into a new adventure.
Something that he mentions in his book that was of great help to me was when he wrote, "one of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little ashamed of your short ones" (King). Reading this gave me the confidence to write. It was my first book in English and it was a good book to start with.