personal essay on what you read for pleasure
It’s very important for everyone to find one type of text they read for pleasure. According to Dorothy E. Zemach’s ideas about strategies leading to success in academics, this helps you become an independent learner by giving an opportunity to practice reading skills outside the classroom and also gives useful information on what you are interested in. This can be different for each personal interest. For mine, I do enjoy reading travel guide books for pleasure the most, when compared to other categories.
All of my lifetime, I have read many books from high school textbooks and academic research journals, to clinical guidelines practices but can not find any pleasure reading them. I read because I had to. This made me think that reading was quite boring . In my childhood, my free time was spent on outdoor activities such as playing soccer and running at the park. When talking about entertainment, I still enjoyed watching or listening to something rather than reading. As time passed, I got a little chance to read something outside of the classroom on a day when the weather was too bad for outdoor activities. I tried several types from cartoons to fiction. Nothing could impress me but the travel guide books.
My first love of travel guide books started when I was 12. It was the year in which I found an event affecting my self-identity, a boy scout camping in the Philippines. This was my first time to travel outside Thailand. As soon as I got there, I realized how different it was from home. There were many languages spoken, various foods to try, and different cultures to learn. It just opened up a new world to me and gave me my first taste of the world. It was on that trip, I realized how much I love traveling and discovering new cultures in order to make me see the bigger world. This positive influence made me able to read something for pleasure for the first time. Definitely, it was a travel guide book. After I had come back from that trip, I started to read many travel guide books to find inspiration about my passion for traveling. I had finished all six books of a trip to India in my high school library in just a year.
Nowadays, there are many forms of travel guides you can read , from classic travel guidebooks, travel magazines, columns in newspapers, website bloggers, to the PDF version of guidebooks. They are all easy to access and to find. I have tried all of them and have found them extremely useful. If you ask me for the best book I had ever read among them, I would recommend the twelfth edition of Lonely Planet guidebook for Scandinavia published in 2016. I chose this brand because it was written by seven authors from diverse backgrounds. I could know the different aspects of people from many regions apart from Thailand to judge what is worth doing in Scandinavia. The book includes full color maps, highlights, itineraries, insider tips and also essential information such as hours of operation, phone numbers, useful websites and prices. After I had finished reading this book, I traveled to Norway and Sweden in 2018 ,without joining a tour group. This trip was planned by myself related to this book. The book helped me tailor this trip to my personal interests and needs. The two weeks trip was completely amazing. I saved a lot of money, got around like a local by avoiding crowds or trouble spots, ate magnificent local foods and was rewarded with the best spot for landscape because of this guidebook.
On my typical days, the most things I read are about my job, like the clinical guidelines which are always updated frequently but there are always travel guidebooks when on freetime. Even though the covid-19 situation is not well controlled and there’s still a travel restriction, I still carry on reading travel guidebooks for pleasure to find new inspiration for the next trip.
Hi Yok, it is my pleasure to read your fantastic experience. I can feel that you really have had great times when visiting the foreign countries and reading the travel guide books. I agree with you that we will get inspirations from doing so. I have never read Lonely Planet's travel guide books, but after reading what you've shared here, I'll read it. Your visits to Norway and Sweden sound interesting. What kind of foods that you had there? Have you been in Stockholm? How was the weather? Have you seen the Northern light?
ReplyDeleteYok's experience with the Lonely Planet guide that helped him get the most out of his adventure travelling around Scandinavia brought back memories of my first visit to Thailand many years ago. Lonely Planet was a valuable resources. In fact, I still have my very battered Lonely Planet guide book for Thailand, which is suspect is now seriously out of date. Some years ago, I gave away most of the books that I had accumulated in Thailand, keeping only those that had sentimental value for me, and a few that work better in the paper form than as digital books. Lonely Planet's guide to Thailand continues to sit on its shelf, along side Jane Austen and Shakespeare.
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