How can I explain the joy that I set from reading? Words can’t explain it. Never the less here in my speech today I will express in human language what reading means to me and how it has made me free even while inside of prison. Locked in a cell twenty for hours a day when I was 16 years old I had no company except the books that I had in my cell. When I picked up those books I discovered a much larger world than the one I had always limited myself to on the streets in the city of St. Louis Missouri. Reading allows me to go wherever I want to on the face of the universe Books take me to opened up worlds to me that I did not even know existed.
It is difficult to explain the feeling that you get from reading. Emotionally books makes you feel whole. You can find your life’s purpose between these pages. When you read you get feelings that can be likened to love. This is how deep and meaningful reading is. As you read the stories of someone else, you wonder how did the author know your thoughts as of he or she already inside of your mind? When we read about history the author takes us back it time and we feel like we aright there on the scene reliving those events again. Reading is better than a movie. The page just takes us away. This is how we get lost in the words as we read. For me, life on the page is real because I feel what the author is taking about. Reading lives inside our heart. I can feel it just as I am taking a breath right now and have sight to see. This is what reading does for me. It does more than just pass the time, it surpasses time. Reading has no limits and it is endless. If it were not for words and language, how can we function?
This is why I promote reading the way that I do with extreme passion. Reading changes people lives and causes them to excel to their highest heights. There is power in words. Reading helps us to see a clearer path. In inspires us to want to become better when we read about someone else accomplishing their goals. Reading is ecstasy. Reading gives us a natural high. It iv intellectual intoxication. There is no side effects. There is no coming down from this high. You just turn the page and even get higher. This is why I love reading.
The mind is a wonderful. It allows you to go where you want to go despite our incarceration. Books take us to places that we have never been or seen. We read books from centuries ago and feel like as if we are right there as it is going down
The mind is like a machine that is always turning, always coming up with new ideas and creating means of ways of doing things. I love reading I read some of everything, Books are my sanctuary. Reading is where I find peace and meaning. The more books that I read, the more I find myself. It seems like the books that I read is the exact book that I needed to read at exactly the moment that I read that particular book.
Books are reading can make us free. It was books that lifter me out of prison. My 20 year sentence is no longer my destiny. Books allow me to see beyond my current prison sentence. Life is bigger than prison and books teach you that.
The right source of reading can make any man free. It is like the old saying of am older person dinking from the fountain of youth. Reading revives and heals the soul.
Malcolm X said that when he was in prison book opened up a new world to him. He said that from the moment on read with every second of free time he had on his hand. This is because reading made him free. I fact he said that he did so much reading that months passed without him even thinking about he fact the he was in prison. He said that at that point in his life he was truly free. And had never been more freer in his entire life.
At first, he read without a particular aim. Then he began to read selectively with the purpose. He said that he knew right there in prison that reading changed the course of his life forever. This is a man the understood the importance of reading.
We also must come to understand the importance of reading and how it will affect the course of our lives from the moment on forward. Man I am telling you that reading can make us free free from importance, free from mediocrity, freedom form not having a purpose, freedom from slavery, etc.
Reading can surely make us free.
By Bobby Bostic
