my reading experience essay

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Pathways to Academe

Teresa Cremin

As an avid childhood reader perhaps it was inevitable that I enjoyed teaching children to read in primary schools and later came to research recreational reading and the practices that support it. Reading took me places as a child—I adventured in fictional worlds, fought dragons, schemed to overthrow the powerful, fell in and out of love and in effect lived vicariously through literature. Years later, still a reader, I find myself intrigued by the connections between my personal and academic identities and interests. How do we come to find the focus of our research journeys and to what extent do our life practices and academic interests feed off one another?

These are some of the questions I want to explore in this chapter as I reflect upon my life history as a reader, as a teacher of reading and as a researcher of children’s and teachers’ identities as readers. Whilst this is of necessity a personal journey, I trust there will be connections for you. Others’ life stories can enable us to make sense of our own experiences, prompting reflection and reminiscence. I hope my narrative will connect to you, enabling you too to revisit your early passions, be they reading, sport, or music for instance, and prompting you to consider how these early interests may have shaped your later life’s work in complex and intriguing ways.

Over the years I have studied and researched far more than reading: teachers’ identities as writers also fascinate me, and the opportunities offered to young children to write creatively. In addition, creative pedagogy, storytelling, drama and play are aspects of my impassioned research enquiries. However, I recognise that when I am reading, researching, talking or writing about reading for pleasure—that volitional act of engagement with texts which offers me such satisfaction—I feel most ‘at home’ as an educator, a researcher and a human. I may even be in my ‘element’ in the words of Robinson (2015) and ‘in flow’ as Csikszentmihalyi (2000) describes those spaces where we are deeply and affectively engaged, aligned with ourselves and able to be creative.

Growing up as a reader

During my formative years I came to love reading. My earliest readerly memories are of re-reading the relatively sparse collection of books we had at home, visiting the library in Banstead to feed my appetite and swapping magazines such as Jackie and Mandy with friends at school. My mother did not really approve of such reading material, which no doubt enhanced my interest and commitment to the genre. Under cover I swapped many of these ‘illicit’ texts with friends; I delighted in them. My dad allowed us to spend our pocket money on what we chose, so I often bought a magazine on Saturday mornings at Chipstead corner shop, then on our return I’d rush to my bedroom, shut the door and devour it in private—furtively stuffing it under the bed afterwards out of mum’s sight. In particular I enjoyed the black and white photo-stories which often ended, after several weeks of tension and discord, in that longed for teenage kiss.

Years later I happened upon reprinted copies of several such magazines (offered free with the Observer) and I felt a visceral sense of joy and re-connection. For four weeks they arrived as part of the Sunday supplement, I rushed to read them like a child and found many strongly ‘affective traces’ of my past (Waller, 2019). I read and re-read the photo stories, searched for the kiss in the final frames, and delighted in the pin ups of Slade (my heart-throb Noddy Holder), and a doe eyed David Essex (or perhaps that was me!) with long hair curling over their shoulders. The visuals transported me back in time. The colour adverts for Rimmel make-up targeted at teens, such as a duo of pink eyeshadows (for just 30 old pence!) that I’d once saved for and then found was out of stock at Boots took me right back to that moment of disappointment. The flowing floral midi dresses with frills reminded me of the tartan wool skirt my mum made for me, (which I had never liked) and discos in Kingswood community hall, with us girls dancing round a lone handbag. Encountering these magazines as an adult, my reading and my past came back with an adrenaline rush of pleasure, teenage angst and a tangible sense of particular places. Needless to say I have kept these jewels of yesteryear, they represent part of my identity as a reader, are much thumbed and well protected.

My childhood pleasure in reading was also sustained by our family holidays. Each year in western Scotland my dad would go fishing with my brother, while my mother and sister would go bird watching or set off on long walks to find wild flowers. Personally, I read. Alone in the bracken (with a meat pie or sausage roll and the promise not to move until they returned), I’d go on adventures far more exciting to me than my siblings’ literal realities. Characters from Eleanor Brent Dyer, Alkan Garner, Susan Cooper, Enid Blyton, the Readers’ Digest real-life stories and many more became my constant companions. Ulapool, the nearest town, was a full hour away on a single track road and there was no library, so whilst I took new books with me each vacation, I was soon obliged to re-read the books in the little croft in which we stayed. Maybe I drew comfort from the steadfastness of the texts left there, the predictability and consistency of the cast of characters to whom I returned year after year. I enjoyed the peace and privacy of revisiting my reading journey. On our days out too, if it rained, I was often left in the car or at a bothy at my own request, happy to read, eat, relax and imagine. Place was of vital importance in these early encounters, my reading was always situated—both at home (always in my bedroom) and on holiday (always alone and often outdoors).

Context counts in our early text encounters and shapes our experience of reading, as memoirs of childhood reading often show (e.g. Mangan, 2018). Which places were of salience to you as you look back on your early reading? Can you recall even now the smell, sound and sensations of your life at the time? The people around you? The emotions attached ? These are part of our reading histories, of who we were and potentially who we became as readers.

Being a reader at school

Intriguingly, my memory of being a reader at school is not particularly strong. Were we read to? I know not. Did we have reading time? I know not. I do recall that my friends and I swapped our magazines and books and chatted about them sometimes. In secondary school I particularly enjoyed books about love during the Irish troubles, for example, Joan Lingard’s Kevin and Sadie’s stories— Across the Barricades —a series of romantic and political fictions, set during the Irish troubles which were being played out at the time. These resonated with West Side Story and of course Romeo and Juliet . I read many tales of love and hope amidst contexts of war and strife, they filled my days with tension and hoped-for romantic resolutions, as well as political questions which my parents couldn’t fully answer. As Mackey highlights, ‘we read our own worlds into the words of our books, and these worlds will not be subtracted from the understanding we develop from the texts’ (2016, p. 263).

While close attention to the construction of literary texts and the need to memorise ‘right answers’ for exams sometimes reduced my pleasure, the rich language of Othello , Nostromo , Paradise Lost , Under Milkwood and many others remain evocative and enticing to me, even to this day. Music to be read and re-read. I fell in love with poetry at this age too, in part fed by the social and cultural practices in which our family engaged. The musicality and rhythms of church psalms and hymns, Guide songs and chants and 70’s lyrics filled my days. My mother directed a Scout and Guide Gang Show every other year and as young people we got to know these songs and tunes by heart, they added to our campfire repertoires and were cheerfully re-voiced on family holidays (by all but my long-suffering dad!). On church youth club trips—weeklong residentials to the Lake District or Snowdonia—in the presence of friends who didn’t attend the same school as me, I chose not to take books—it didn’t feel right. Instead I hid my passion for fiction and poetry, not wanting to be seen as overly learned. Retrospectively, I think I was probably trying on a ‘take it or leave it’ reader identity, to see what difference it might make.

With A levels dominating everything, and English, biology and history texts to study (‘wider reading’ wasn’t celebrated or valued in those days), my pleasure in fiction was diminished at the end of secondary schooling. The environment that had previously supported and challenged my growth as a reader was shrinking to a single focus: get the grades to get into university. No one from my family had ever attended university and I felt a desire and a pressure to break the mould, to be university material. It took time and single-minded determination; freetime fiction reading had to be placed to one side.

Did the same happen to you as you grew up as a reader? Did you experience a sense of distance from the pleasure of being a reader as your life changed and the system obliged you to prioritise academic work? Or did you remain engaged as a reader despite these pressures? Perhaps you didn’t experience reading as tempting and delightful in your early years? We are all unique readers on our own journeys with different stories to tell, but through reflecting on our life histories as readers we can learn a great deal, both about reading and ourselves.

Being a reader at university

At Bristol, I read psychology and papered my bedroom walls with the verses of Dylan Thomas, Roger McGough, Helen Steiner Rice, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Adrian Mitchell and many other poets whose voices I wanted to capture and possess, but it seemed there was even less time there for fiction, for other worlds, others’ lives, loves and magic. Even on holidays I don’t recall choosing to read for relaxation. The habit had gone, dusted down perhaps as a passing childhood passion. Looking back, whilst I think I did see myself as a reader then, I framed myself as a serious undergraduate reader of psychology, social anthropology, child development and memory, not as a free reader venturing into imagined worlds. In our flat no-one bought or discussed fiction—we were variously studying politics, psychology, biochemistry and geology and focused on getting good grades (alongside the usual social life and long nights discussing the world). I cannot recall a single conversation about reading novels. Maybe we implicitly viewed such reading as childish, Richard and Judy book clubs had not been conceived and perhaps less profile was given to recreational reading.

Did your peer group also shape your reading practices, as they did mine, not only as a young child but later too? No doubt I shaped my flatmates’ reading lives as well, there was no network for us to tap into as fiction readers, nor did we create one. Although now, years later, the five of us do occasionally chat about novels, swap titles and give books for each other’s birthdays.

Learning about reading as a teacher

After university I did a PGCE in Cambridge to become a teacher. There I was reintroduced to pleasures of fiction, read children’s texts very widely, and learnt about their complexity. Children’s texts are not some watered-down version of adult literature, but like all literary texts, have the potential to create aesthetic experiences that enhance our understanding of the human condition. As Bruner (1990) has shown, we use narrative to make sense of experience and to represent and reflect on our broader social world. In my training, I encountered reader response theories which view reading as an active meaning-making process between reader(s) and text(s). As I studied reading for the first time, I began to realise that texts are not fixed, but develop their potentiality through the reader’s engagement with them (Rosenblatt,1978/,1994; Iser, 1978) .

In school as an ingenue teacher, I remember trying to help children engage with reading and find themselves in the mirrors of fiction (Bishop, 1990). I read aloud to my classes, shared my newly unquenchable thirst for fiction (and poetry) and tried to help create legacies of past satisfaction for the young. However, some simply didn’t want to know, they were already deeply disinterested due to past experiences—even as 7-8 year olds. They eschewed any sense of a reader identity, and labelled those who read as ‘boring’ and ‘geeks’. They had not yet found what reading was good for. Although I worked to get to know these readers, and used my repertoire of children’s texts to make recommendations, I feel sure I didn’t make positive reader identity positions available to all. Then, the concept of reader identities was unknown to me, I was unaware I was framing the readers in my class. I did however try to offer stories that opened doors and windows to others’ worlds, in order for children to develop empathy and awareness of the plight of others, perhaps as I had done through the Irish troubles Kevin and Sadie stories years before. I also shared my own passion for reading with children.

I recall finding Bridge to Terabithia , a children’s novel by Katherine Patterson, very moving, and was crying when Darren, a boy from my class, encountered me on the pavement outside school at lunchtime. The death in the text resonated with the loss of my closest girlfriend some months before; I was overwrought and propping myself up on a post, unable to move. “It’s alright miss’ Darren reassured me, “books get you like that sometimes don’t they?- like they’re real you know—but they’re not” . I can still see his face at that moment in my mind’s eye, decades later.

If reading is anything, it is surely thinking about meaning, and when we connect the texts we read to the stories of our lives (and vice versa) we bring our memories, experiences, prior knowledge and understanding to bear on whatever we are reading. As Rosenblatt observed:

The special meaning… the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition… in a never to be duplicated combination (Rosenblatt,1978/1995, p. 30-31).

It is the transaction between readers and texts and these notions of the reader’s life, past and present and the ‘physical condition’ and ‘particular mood of the moment’ that in large part shape and influence our affective engagement in reading. I feel sure you can recall occasions when you experienced an almost visceral bodily response to a text, and /or a personal and emotional connection that enabled you to re-read your life through the narrative? The black and white marks on the page resonate with the meanings we bring and those we co-create with the author as we read, and that applies to this chapter you are reading, as well as works of fiction.

Researching reading for pleasure

I found the research around reading so intriguing that when I moved to the university sector, I began to explore the role of Reading Teachers, teachers who read and readers who teach (Commeyras et al., 2003). I wanted to understand if positioning oneself more personally as a reader, and teaching from a reader’s point of view, might make a difference to children’s desire, motivation, and behaviour as readers. My reading journey was beginning to shape the questions I wanted to answer as a new researcher and teacher educator.

So, working with UK Literacy Association colleagues we piloted a Teachers as Readers survey of teachers’ reading practices and their knowledge and use of children’s texts. 1200 teachers from 11 Local Authorities completed it and we were shocked by the results. The data revealed that whilst these teachers were readers in their adult lives, when it came to school they relied on a limited canon of books from their childhood and celebrity children’s authors. Dahl dependency was worryingly rife (Cremin et al., 2008a, b). Incredibly, 22% could not name a single poet and 24% could not name a single picture fiction creator. These findings, which received considerable media and policy interest, created cause for concern, how could teachers possibly foster reader development without such subject knowledge.

So in my next project Teachers as Readers Phase II we foregrounded teachers’ experience of texts and their pleasure in them, and prompted teachers not only to read more widely, but also to reflect upon their practices and preferences as readers. We also examined the potential dynamic between teachers and children as readers. Amongst myriad insights, the project revealed that volitional reading is strongly influenced by relationships: between teachers; teachers and children; children and families; and children, teachers, families and communities, and that a reading for pleasure agenda can be developed effectively through the creation of classroom reading communities of reciprocity and interaction (Cremin et al., 2014). Such communities, the research indicated, are most effectively led by Reading Teachers who recognise the significance of reader identity in reader development and frame their practice in responsive ways.

Was I researching my own practice as a teacher from years before, only this time through a more informed socio-cultural lens? Perhaps so, although I don’t think I fully appreciated that at the time. Through case studies, we found that those practitioners who developed most fully as Reading Teachers appeared to make the most impact upon the children’s attitudes and attainment.

Since then, I have worked on a number of reading research projects. I sought to understand the role librarians play in extracurricular reading groups, (Cremin and Swann, 2016, 2017) and the ways digital library systems position teachers as monitors and curators of children’s reading, not as co-readers or mentors (Kucirkova and Cremin, 2017). More recently, working alongside other OU colleagues, we examined the disengagement of young boy readers. Soberingly, this revealed that teachers’ perceptions of children’s gender, class and ethnicity shape their practice, significantly constraining the boys’ engagement as readers (Hempel Jorgensen, Cremin, Harris and Chamberlain, 2018).

In each of these studies, our research questions, though tailored to the project in question, linked in some way to the children and adults reader identities.More recently I’ve developed a practitioner community website to share some of this research, which has hundreds of examples of teachers’ evidence informed practice, developed as a consequence of their engagement with OU/ UKLA Teacher Reading Groups. These inspiring examples, in line with the research, demonstrate that when practitioners read more widely, get to know the children as readers, develop their reading for pleasure pedagogy, and a Reading Teacher stance, they are enabled to build strong communities of engaged readers. These communities have positive consequences for young readers. (See: https://researchrichpedagogies.org/research/reading-for-pleasure .)

Each study and the website have helped me understand more of the complex relationships, identity enactments and interplay between adult and child and child-child readers. In effect, my early pleasure in reading and renewed passion has been examined through this work. The lines between being a reader and researching reading have become blurred. Perhaps this has happened in your life story too? Have your personal practices and intense enthusiasm for something influenced your own scholarly enquiries?

The impact work has raised new questions for me as a researcher too. Teachers in the Reading Groups have shown energy and commitment, but they have found it hard to track the progression and development of children’s affective engagement, attitudes and behaviours as readers. So I am working with teachers to understand how to document the subtle nature of readers’ identity shifts. We cannot measure their pleasure, but researchers, working in collaboration with the profession, can surely find ways forward.

Looking back, I can see there are intriguing connections between my own childhood passion for reading and my later research enquiries. Fuelled in part by life experience and personal interest, I have come to study an aspect of my own life—my reading identity—and to explore the possibility that our identities as literate adults have salience for those we work with in classrooms. In building reader relationships and sharing their reading identities, Reading Teachers appear to hold up a mirror to their own practices as readers and in the process learn more about what real readers do. They then consider the pedagogical consequence of this new understanding and act to enable young readers to exert their rights as readers. This, my research indicates, impacts on their pleasure.

Writing this chapter has also prompted me to consider if my reading research has fed my personal reading practices. It is certainly the case that I remain an avid reader, I always have an adult and a children’s book on the go, spend far too much money on books, and have been a member of a book group for over 20 years. In that context, whilst I can never turn my researcher’s mind completely off, I try to participate as an adult reader and friend, not an academic. The group though is undoubtedly a micro community of readers, and attending provokes my thinking, raising new questions about the nature of reading.

Whilst I swapped Jackie and Mandy comics with my friends many years ago and hid them from mum, the emotional pleasure I experienced reading them, the connections I made to my life and the lives of the characters within them—real and fictional—helped shape me as a reader. At the time of reading and sharing them with friends I was unaware of the place these texts would play on my life journey, but I can see now that the social, affective and relational nature of this small weekly reading practice helped sustain us, both as readers and as friends.

Such retrospective insights about the highly social, situated and contextual nature of reading have been evidenced in much of my empirical research in classrooms, although it has taken the writing of this chapter to fully recognise this. It is now clearer to me that the social environment, our literacy histories, others’ perceptions of us as readers and our interactions around reading, influence our attitudes to and understanding of what it might mean to be a reader in particular contexts. As this chapter documents, my sense of identity as a reader waxed and waned, burgeoned and bloomed at different times over the decades depending on my relationships and work contexts. As educators and researchers, we need to pay more attention to this complexity and enable policy makers to acknowledge this too. Readers’ identities matter.

I wonder if my writing has caused you too to recollect your own reading history and identity and consider not dissimilar issues? Perhaps in encountering my journey as a child reader to a reading researcher, you have begun to look back on your life story, to consider the passions and pleasures which shaped your life journey—whether that be an enthusiasm for music, sport, reading, or a concern with injustice or equality for instance. Can we really leave our childhood selves, our early passions and practices behind? I am not sure, though perhaps some people deliberately do so, eschewing the narratives of the past in order to shape alternative futures which allow new interests to blossom. Our life stories are not unlike the narratives found in fiction—rich, diverse and intriguing and there are always new stories waiting to be told.

Bishop, R.S. (1990). Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom , 6 (3), pp. x-xi.

Clark, C. (2013). Children’s and Young People’s Reading Today. Findings from the 2012 National Literacy Trust’s annual survey. London: National Trust.

Commeyras, M., Bisplinghoff, B.S. and Olson, J. (2003). Teachers as Readers: Perspectives on the importance of reading in teachers’ classrooms and lives.  Newark: International Reading Association.

Cremin, T., Bearne, E., Mottram, M. and Goodwin, P. (2008b). Exploring teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature. Cambridge Journal of Education , 38(4): 449–64.

Cremin, T., Mottram, M., Collins, F., Powell, S. and Safford, K. (2009a). Teachers as readers: building communities of readers. Literacy 43 (1), pp. 11-19.

Cremin, T. Mottram, M. Powell, S, Collins R and Safford K. (2014). Building Communities of Engaged Readers: Reading for pleasure.  London and NY: Routledge

Cremin, T. and Swann, J. (2016). Literature in Common: Reading for Pleasure in School Reading Groups’ in Rothbauer , P., Skjerdingstad, K.I., McKechnie, L.. Oterholm, K. (Eds). Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory/Practice/ Politics . pp. 279-300. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Cremin, T. and Swann, J. (2017). School librarians as facilitators of extracurricular reading groups in J. Pihl, K. Skinstad van der Kooij and T.C. Carlsten (Eds). Teacher and Librarian Partnerships in Literacy Education in the 21st Century,  pp. 118-137. Olso: Sense Publishers: New Voices and New Knowledge in Educational Research.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness . London: Rider.

Hempel-Jorgensen, A., Cremin, T., Harris D. and Chamberlain, L. (2018). Pedagogy for reading for pleasure in low socio-economic primary schools: beyond ‘pedagogy of poverty’? Literacy 52 (2): 86-94.

Kucirkova, N. and Cremin, T. (2017) Personalised reading for pleasure with digital libraries: Towards a pedagogy of practice and design. Cambridge Journal of Education 1-19.

Mackey, M. (2016). One Child Reading: My Auto-bibliography.  Edmonton: the University of Alberta Press.

Robinson, K. (2009). The Element: How finding your passion changes everything. London, Allen lane.

Rosenblatt, L. (1995). Literature as Exploration. New York: Modern Languages Association of America.

Twist, L., Schagan, I. and Hogson, C. (2007). Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS): Reader and Reading National Report for England 2006. London: NFER and DCSF.

Waller, A. (2019). Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics: Perspectives on children’s literature.  London, Bloomsbury.

Voices of Practice Copyright © 2021 by Teresa Cremin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Free Samples and Examples of Essays, Homeworks and any Papers

• Absolutely free
• Perfect homeworks
• Fast relevant search
• No registration and Anonymous

My reading experience

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: Creative Writing , Literature

This week, I have read seven articles, but only Eudora Welty’s ‘One Writer’s Beginnings” left a deep impression on me because it made me recall my own reading experience and education process when I just saw the title of this article. I could not say I am a writer, but I think I am a totally reading lover. After reading the “One Writer’s Beginnings”, I think there is a little bit similar between Eudora Welty’s childhood and mine. However, perhaps I did not have the gift of writing, or I did not work hard enough. In another word, I do not have any advantages on writing. Next, I would like to talk about my reading experience, which include three parts, reading before go to school, reading during school time, self-reading experience. Recall my reading experience over the years, book told me stories, taught me knowledge, and always around me, so I have to say that reading is a very enjoyable thing. Remember it was when I came to Seattle not long, that was a sunshine afternoon, a cup of tea was in my hand. Many kids were playing and frolicking on the grass in front of my apartment.

That scene made me recall to my childhood. When I was four years old, my mother read to me just like Eudora Welt’s mother did. I tried my best to recall the scene in my mind. I was sad to say I was too young at that time, so I do not remember her tone when she was reading to me, but I still remember the scene at the time, I remember her face when she was reading, her slightly upturned corners of the mouth while Robinson Crusoe saved a person and called him Friday. I remember the wind with a faint smell of the sea when she read the Treasure Island to me, and her cunning eyes when she read DR. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Reading was the memorable part of my childhood, and I had the preliminary understanding of reading, I want to say that my mother was the first teacher of my life who taught me to read. When I was older, my family had to move from Beijing to the ancient capital Nanjing because my father changed his job. My family did not have much money, we had to take the “green train” (the slowest and oldest train in China, always crowded, most of passengers do not have seats, not in service right now), and unfortunate I had to leave all my books.

The Essay on Learning is Just a Matter of Reading and Remembering

Throughout a person's life they acquire a vast amount of information, skills and values, most of which are learned. The knowledge and abilities that are thus gained extend across a broad spectrum from the very basic such as knowing the alphabet or walking to the extremely complex such as understanding quantum physics or flying a helicopter. Personal experience clearly indicates that not everything ...

Before we got on the train, my father bought me a very old book, the Three Kingdoms from a used books store. I had already known a few words at that time, so my mother let me read by myself, which was the first time I read without anyone’s help. Indeed, I still did not plentiful of words, but it was really excited to say, I knew how to use a dictionary when I was young. Until now, I still remember what the book looked like, it was not any pictures on the cover, just the book’s name, “the Three kingdoms” on the dark blue cover of the book, every page in this book was yellowish and rough, the smell was not so good, it was smell like a mixture of soap and gasoline. However, I cherished this book, I slept with it, and sometimes I fantasized about the battle scenes were described in the book. After that, I started to read some books that use my father’s words “for men”, such as “the Art of War”, “the Old man and the Sea” and “the Sun Also Rises”.

During my childhood, the books always around me, they let me always happy even in the tough environment. Furthermore, the books let me understand this world more than the other kids who were the same ages as me. I think these all attributed to my parents. Time flies, after lived in Nanjing for two years. Finally, I went to school, I was later than other peer children. At the beginning of the primary school, I could not adapt to the reading method. Gradually, I started to realize that reading in school was not for fun, it was for studying. At school, I read a lot of articles and poetries such as Confucian Analects and Tang Poems. The classical Chinese is fantastic before I understood their magic I did not think it was reading, I even queried that is this Chinese? However, from the study of gradually, I gradually could understand how beautiful are they, sometimes, Classical Chinese expresses artistic conception and feeling to describe a scene or a thing. Anyway, reading a classical Chinese’s article is an extremely difficult task, except for the uncommon words, the most difficult part is feeling.

The Essay on Book Books Reading Read

I found this book totally outstanding. Its a book full of descriptions, makes you want to read on every chapter. the a uther makes the book very touchy, and intreging. At times the book makes you want to cry, its so poiniant. After reading this book I find mys lef very lucky to have what I have.There were times when i re-read the paragraph just to see if it was really saying what it was saying. ...

It is worth mentioning that learning classical Chinese literature strengthened my foundation of reading and strengthened my understanding of articles, let me got the advantage on reading in the future. Fortunately, they did not ask me to read the classical Chinese article every day, I had found that I still can read for fun even in school. I read a lot of Eastern and Western articles, the first book I read in school was Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in this book I saw a real person who is innocent and lively, is eager to take risks, the pursuit of freedom called Tom Sawyer. After that, I started to read western literary classics such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Boule de Suif by Maupassant. For Eastern author, I read almost all of Lu Xun’s and Lao She’s articles. Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy was very famous. Reading this kind of literature let me understand many things about our society and people.

The beautiful words in these articles aroused my desire for writing. In these years of reading experience, I tried to write something by my own, but my writing skills are not improve any more, my mother told me that I could write a diary, I know it could be a good way to improve my writing skills, but I always lack a kind of perseverance to stick to it. In my own words, I think writing would be fun, so I just try to write something for fun, and I also think more reading will help. Let me use the words from Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, “By now I do not know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.” I think here the author points out that reading and writing is not separate, they are connected to each other. For me, I think I should write practice more for my writing and have fun on that. For now, speak of my whole reading experience, no matter formal or informal, both are the key treasure in my life. I hope one day, I can write my story for other people to read. Maybe one day, I will hear the voice too, just like Eudora Welty. In Eudora Welty’s article, she introduced the reading and writing experience to me, they are very worthy to me to learn,

The Essay on The Relational Dimensions Of Learning To Read And Write

Writing Article Response Beyond Words: The Relational Dimensions of Learning to Read and Write By Judith Lysaker The article that I have chosen to discuss ... learning of language arts. The article is about a young boy who is not reading or writing in class. He goes along ... like such a fun and easy process. I believe that my elementary school in Jordan District had a phenomenal reading program that ...

Similar Papers

School time wanted home.

... my own age. Six hours of school time was a long time, I always looking at the ... I thought about going to school also how I felt about experiencing a new and different ... everything will go away somehow. When I read "Half a pound of ham," by Bernadette ...

Reading More Books

... read book By Chris Barnardo Reading ... the experience of reading. Ask ... writing skills are also improved by regular reading. Reading ... have short articles about ... times in their lives, such as the separation of parents, starting a new school, ... pick a word of ...

Creative Writing and High School

... throughout School with Writing and Reading As time went on, I was out of elementary school and into middle school. This was the time when book ... were on the road and read books like there was no tomorrow. I made writing and reading fun for myself and I ...

Analysis Paper: Zinsser’s Book on Writing

... reading Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, and one he presents. In his book, ... sentence in any article is the first ... writing assignments. He advises that I eliminate any unnecessary words ... read further. Along with creatively beginning and ending my writing ...

Reading a Book vs Listening to an Audio Book

... reading, that allows the option of one to read and hear the book at the same time, ... the reading experience when using audio books, others, that it is still reading either ... through audio books. Hearing the actual words in your head by reading to oneself ...

My Writing Experience

... experience, People always say “Practice makes perfect” so the saying goes and thus to develop English article writing ... I should use, or how to word and punctuate a sentence to express ... that I would like to. Every time whenever I get my essay back, ...

My Experience With Reading And Writing

There is more to reading than just books and there is more to writing than just essays. When I think of reading and writing, the first thing that comes to mind is English class. I think of reading a 300-page book and writing a 5-page book report on it. This association is not fair to reading and writing as they are so much more behind these subjects. English is applied in many aspects of my life and without it we would be so limited in what we could do. We wouldn’t be able to read road signs, follow a cooking recipe, or even text a friend. These are vital skills to have, and as difficult as it was for me to develop these skills, I am grateful I have them now.

My journey with literature steams from a young age. Growing up, my parents were very supportive and wanted to help my sister and me to be the best we could be. In order to do that, they always encouraged us to read. This began with them reading me stories before bed. As a little kid, I loved listening to my parents read me books. I had lots of favorite books, but my favorite was when my mom would read me Shel Silverstein’s poems. My interest in reading shifted when I had to read to myself. As my dad encouraged me, I would read to him beginner books called Bob Books. They were only a few pages long, designed to help me improve my reading skills. This was when my personal dislike towards reading began. I no longer found enjoyment while reading so I tried my very best to avoid it. 

Each summer, my sister and I participated in the library programs since our parents thought this would help to motivate us to write more and improve our writing skills. We joined the Reading Club and the Mail Buddy Program. We could earn prizes for the number of books for the reading club. My sister would always win tons of prizes, because she enjoyed reading, but I would never read enough to win. My mom tried her best to encourage me, but the dread of reading was far worse than seeing my sister win a prize I could not attain. At the library, we also had to join a program where we designed mailboxes and wrote letters to one another. My mom’s rule for us that we had to write at least 10 letters a week. So, my sister and I would both sit down at the kitchen table and write them. Similarly to reading, I disliked to write and put up a big fuss with it, but I would ultimately always do it. My older sister is a fantastic writer and loves reading so she loved participating in all of these programs. I, on the other hand, felt it was a punishment and dreaded doing it. Despite my family stressing the importance of reading and writing, I never bought into it. 

As I got older, I went to great lengths to avoid reading and writing. I haven’t read a book outside of school in over 6 years. Over past the year, I strategically made choices to limit when I would have to read and write. In high school, my goal was to study Finance at U of I, so I selected my courses to meet U of I requirements. The AP English that I chose for my junior year met the composition requirement at U of I. This was the last real English class I took, and the next closest thing was my Public Speaking course which I took my first semester of college. So, it has now been four years since I wrote a paper that was not a business analysis report or a technical paper. It has been five years since my last formal English class. This has led to rusty storytelling writing skills. 

Though I have tried to avoid using these skills throughout my life, the reality is that I must use them on a day-to-day basis. Consequently, I have developed my skills through these instances. My professional career forces me to employ and develop these skills, especially when I send and receive email and text messages, when I am writing my resume or cover letters for a job application and to update my LinkedIn or Handshake. Though it is stressful and nerve racking when I am forced to face my challenges my career helped me to develop skills I never even consider I would need very often.

I finally came around to reading for pleasure once I found my interest. I learned that I may never find a passion for reading a book, but I love reading about topics I want to learn more about. My two main sources of reading now come from Bloomberg Business and Tech Insider. I enjoy diving into the world of new technologies and fast changing companies through the articles I find from these sources. This interest in the subject is both fascinating and helpful for me as I learn more about the industry. I have grown a lot from refusing to read to reading articles before bed every night. My reading journey has come full circle. The skills I have developed throughout my life are being put to use for enjoyment and classes, but most importantly, they are helping me greatly in the professional world. As much as I dislike reading and writing, I am grateful for the encouragement I received. 

Because I was never attracted to literature, I leaned towards a profession in finance. I believed that a number driven career was the best route for me because I could deal with numbers instead of having to process reading material. As I took more classes within my major, I found myself searching for materials regarding companies and new technology. I discovered how resourceful and interesting Bloomberg Business and Tech Insider are and I made time each night to read them. The lessons I have learned is that I have progressed significantly from refusing to read to actively seeking materials which help me to be better and smarter in my career field. Thanks to my family’s involvement and the instances where I was forced to use reading and writing in my professional career, I grew as a writer, and I am better able to confront the situations where I must use these skills. Finance may be driven by numbers, which is what has led me to this point, but my foundation of reading has helped me to grow beyond the classroom. As much as I hated reading and writing, I am grateful for the encouragement I received.

Related Samples

• Reflective Essay about Personality Assessment
• Live to work or work to live
• My English 101 Experience
• Personal Essay: Why I Love Traveling
• Importance of Dreams Essay Example
• My Mother Essay Example
• Personal Essay Example about Gym
• The Importance of Optimism Essay Example
• Narrative Essay about My Family
• Research Paper about The Minimum Wage

Didn't find the perfect sample?

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

• Free Samples
• Premium Essays
• Editing Services Editing Proofreading Rewriting
• Extra Tools Essay Topic Generator Thesis Generator Citation Generator GPA Calculator Study Guides Donate Paper
• Essay Writing Help
• About Us About Us Testimonials FAQ
• Studentshare
• My Reading Experience

My Reading Experience - Essay Example

• Subject: Literature
• Type: Essay
• Level: Ph.D.
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 2
• Author: herminia39

Extract of sample "My Reading Experience"

Reading ExperienceI have liking for many authors such as William Golding, William Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Charlotte Bronte, Iris Murdock, Arthur Miller and many more. I hope that I will be facilitated to read about more authors and literature with the passage of time. I really intend to read as many literary works as is possible because I have developed a good taste for literature reading. Some of the people try to read something about the literary work before starting it in actuality.

However, as far as I am concerned, I want to read every literary work without any biased opinion in my mind. It is due to this fact that I prefer to read the original work before getting into any kind of critical reading.With studying literature, the students get fair chances to read the literature of their choice as well as that literature that is likable by the educationists. It seems that a very well written literature is chosen for the students to read in order to make them active readers.

Reading is also a skill that one is able to perform after some learning. For reading literature, close reading should be there so that the internal values of a work can be extracted. The literary works should not be read with their surface meanings but they should be read with proper evaluation of language employed by the authors. The works should be read between the lines.There are many critical theories to approach literature such as Feminism, Psychoanalytic theory to literature, Formalistic approach to literature, Marxism and so on.

After gaining knowledge about these theories, I have tried to apply them on some works. By evaluating the language and style of the writer and by scrutinizing the intrinsic values of the work, the literary works can be seen in various lights. For example, while reading Hamlet, the Psychoanalytic theory to approach literature can be used in evaluating the delayed action taken by Hamlet and his mother’s and his association. In different critical theories, the critics have their own style of judgment and see different values in a work.

I have found Psychoanalysis the most interesting as the critics base their judgments on Freud’s defined concepts such as dream work, mother child association, Freudian slip and so on. I have found all these concepts quite interesting and while reading any literary work, I try to find some of the elements highlighted by Freud. Feminist critics try to judge the works according to representation of women by men and women writers and also evaluate the dominant relationships of men with women. The Marxist critics base their evaluation on the teachings of Karl Marx and they try to get to the deep meaning of a text in place of surface meaning and they look at the extrinsic values of literature along with intrinsic values.

I like psychoanalytic approach to reading literature because of Freud’s conceptualization of various human perspectives. I do not say that whatever he has recognized is true but everything looks interesting and makes one inquisitive. I want to read many works by many authors such as Emily Bronte, William Golding, Arthur Miller, Faulkner, Iris Murdock and so on.

• Cited: 0 times
• Copy Citation Citation is copied Copy Citation Citation is copied Copy Citation Citation is copied

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF My Reading Experience

Pale fire by nabokov and watchmen by alan moore, summary of i felt a funeral, in my brain, the use of narratives to create the human experience, reading response: poetry and performance, reflective account of two placement experiences, reading experience as an undergraduate, creating perceptions of reality through words and experience, sri ramakrishna and mysticism.

• TERMS & CONDITIONS
• PRIVACY POLICY
• COOKIES POLICY

Sample details

• Words: 1244
• Views: 1,047

Related Topics

• Perspective
• Reconstruction
• Meaning Of Life
• Locus of control

My reading experience

This hebdomad. I have read seven articles. but merely Eudora Welty’s ‘One Writer’s Beginnings” left a deep feeling on me because it made me remember my ain reading experience and instruction procedure when I merely saw the rubric of this article. I could non state I am a author. but I think I am a wholly reading lover. After reading the “One Writer’s Beginnings” . I think there is a small spot similar between Eudora Welty’s childhood and mine. However. possibly I did non hold the gift of composing. or I did non work hard plenty. In another word. I do non hold any advantages on composing. Following. I would wish to speak about my reading experience. which include three parts. reading before spells to school. reading during school clip. self-reading experience. Remember my reading experience over the old ages. book told me narratives. learn me knowledge. and ever around me. so I have to state that reading is a really gratifying thing. Remember it was when I came to Seattle non long. that was a sunshine afternoon. a cup of tea was in my manus. Many childs were playing and larking on the grass in forepart of my flat.

That scene made me remember to my childhood. When I was four old ages old. my female parent read to me merely like Eudora Welt’s female parent did. I tried my best to remember the scene in my head. I was sad to state I was excessively immature at that clip. so I do non retrieve her tone when she was reading to me. but I still retrieve the scene at the clip. I remember her face when she was reading. her somewhat overturned corners of the oral cavity while Robinson Crusoe saved a individual and called him Friday. I remember the air current with a swoon odor of the sea when she read the Treasure Island to me. and her cunning eyes when she read DR. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Reading was the memorable portion of my childhood. and I had the preliminary apprehension of reading. I want to state that my female parent was the first instructor of my life who taught me to read. When I was older. my household had to travel from Beijing to the ancient capital Nanjing because my male parent changed his occupation. My household did non hold much money. we had to take the “green train” ( the slowest and oldest train in China. ever crowded. most of riders do non hold seats. non in service right now ) . and unfortunate I had to go forth all my books.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

Before we got on the train. my male parent bought me a really old book. the Three Kingdoms from a used books store. I had already known a few words at that clip. so my female parent allow me read by myself. which was the first clip I read without anyone’s aid. Indeed. I still did non plentiful of words. but it was truly aroused to state. I knew how to utilize a dictionary when I was immature. Until now. I still retrieve what the book looked like. it was non any images on the screen. merely the book’s name. “the Three kingdoms” on the dark bluish screen of the book. every page in this book was xanthous and unsmooth. the odor was non so good. it was smell like a mixture of soap and gasolene. However. I cherished this book. I slept with it. and sometimes I fantasized about the conflict scenes were described in the book. After that. I started to read some books that usage my father’s words “for men” . such as “the Art of War” . “the Old adult male and the Sea” and “the Sun Besides Rises” .

During my childhood. the books ever around me. they let me ever happy even in the tough environment. Furthermore. the books allow me understand this universe more than the other childs who were the same ages as me. I think these all attributed to my parents. Time flies. after lived in Nanjing for two old ages. Finally. I went to school. I was subsequently than other peer kids. At the beginning of the primary school. I could non accommodate to the reading method. Gradually. I started to recognize that reading in school was non for merriment. it was for analyzing. At school. I read a batch of articles and poesies such as Confucian Analects and Tang Poems. The classical Chinese is antic before I understood their thaumaturgy I did non believe it was reading. I even queried that is this Chinese? However. from the survey of bit by bit. I bit by bit could understand how beautiful are they. sometimes. Classical Chinese expresses artistic construct and feeling to depict a scene or a thing. Anyway. reading a classical Chinese’s article is an highly hard undertaking. except for the uncommon words. the most hard portion is experiencing.

It is deserving adverting that larning classical Chinese literature strengthened my foundation of reading and strengthened my apprehension of articles. allow me acquire the advantage on reading in the hereafter. Fortunately. they did non inquire me to read the classical Chinese article every twenty-four hours. I had found that I still can read for merriment even in school. I read a batch of Eastern and Western articles. the first book I read in school was Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. in this book I saw a existent individual who is guiltless and lively. is eager to take hazards. the chase of freedom called Tom Sawyer. After that. I started to read western literary classics such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Boule de Suif by Maupassant. For Eastern writer. I read about all of Lu Xun’s and Lao She’s articles. Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy was really celebrated. Reading this sort of literature allow me understand many things about our society and people.

The beautiful words in these articles aroused my desire for composing. In these old ages of reading experience. I tried to compose something by my ain. but my authorship accomplishments are non better any more. my female parent told me that I could compose a diary. I know it could be a good manner to better my composing accomplishments. but I ever lack a sort of doggedness to lodge to it. In my ain words. I think composing would be merriment. so I merely seek to compose something for merriment. and I besides think more reading will assist. Let me utilize the words from Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. “By now I do non cognize whether I could make either one. reading or authorship. without the other. ” I think here the writer points out that reading and composing is non separate. they are connected to each other. For me. I think I should compose pattern more for my authorship and have fun on that. For now. speak of my whole reading experience. no affair formal or informal. both are the cardinal hoarded wealth in my life. I hope one twenty-four hours. I can compose my narrative for other people to read. Possibly one twenty-four hours. I will hear the voice excessively. merely like Eudora Welty. In Eudora Welty’s article. she introduced the reading and composing experience to me. they are really worthy to me to larn.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/my-reading-experience-essay-essay/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

• Difficulties
• Quality of life
• Stereotypes
• Transformation
• Life Changing Experience
• Helping Others
• Determination

Check more samples on your topics

Reading aloud: an aid for delayed reading comprehension.

Reading Comprehension delays can occur for various reasons including language barriers, behavioral disorders including Attention Deficient Disorder and even reading impairment. However, children who have a hard time understanding what they are reading can be helped significantly by listening and participating in reading aloud within a classroom. Judith Gold and Akimi Gibson published an article

My Early Reading Experience

A Christmas Carol

My Early Reading ExperienceTo begin with, I believe that reading is one of the most important skills a person acquires throughout his life. It is crucial that a child becomes familiar with literature at an early age. Not only does it broaden the perspective and open a whole new world full of excitement, adventures, suspense

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment

What the writer is essentially trying to do is explain the effect of judgment on experience and the effect of experience on judgment. Here experience can be assumed to mean success or failure in our business, financial ventures etc.Experience can also mean our success or failure in our relationships, academic performance etc. Judgment can be assumed to

TBLT Reading Lesson Plan

Lesson Plan

Lesson Objectives: reading comprehension, summarizing, skimming & scanning articles for main ideas and details, negotiating meaning, acquiring vocabulary related to theme Vocabulary: stem cell, embryo, pluripotent, morph, cloning, gestation, transplant Critical Thinking: listing, ordering & sorting, comparing & contrasting, collaborating Task Type: Reasoning, prediction, split information, opinion, decision-making (convergent), debate (divergent), memory challenge, real-world texts, focused &

Reading Fiction Books is more Enjoyable than Watching Movies

　Are you tired of flashy scenes and showy special effects of movies? Do you still remember the enjoyment of reading books in midnight with a cup of hot coffee and an enquiring mind? As technology develops, movies seem to be increasingly popular among people from all walks of life. However, reading fiction books is still

Rhetorical Reading Response: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”

Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue" (1990) delves into her mother's use of "broken English" and the various "Englishes" she encounters in her daily life. Tan highlights the challenges her mother has faced as a result of her English proficiency and the diverse forms of English that surround her. Through sharing examples, Tan effectively communicates the

A Raisin In The Sun Reading Logs

Raisin in the Sun

This tells Walter something is wrong and her being upset could foreshadow complications between them. Ruth longs for a new life. Day: Walter talks about a dream of owning a liquor store. He has the idea of getting some money from his Mom. Ruth denies him and ignores his dreams. They get into a fight

The Amazing Power of Mind Reading

When we hear the words mind reading we portray the ideas of psychics who are believed to have the ability to read another individuals mind by the use of an extra sense called telepathy. Telepathy is used within the performing art of mentalism in which an individual known as the mentalist demonstrates their power of

Developing Reading and Writing For English Readers

Annotated Bibliography

Col, J. (2018). Little Explorers. Retrieved from https://www.enchantedlearning.com/Dictionary.html This user-friendly educational website caters to ELLs by developing language through picture dictionaries. The dictionaries come in many languages with English translation. There are five levels of picture dictionaries that vary in difficulty. Each page of a picture dictionary is devoted to one letter of the alphabet taking

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Experience — My Experience in learning to read and write

My Experience in Learning to Read and Write

• Categories: Personal Experience

About this sample

Words: 579 |

Published: Oct 4, 2018

Words: 579 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. In Handbook of reading research (Vol. 1, pp. 255-291). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., & Osborn, J. (2003). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read. National Institute for Literacy.
• Chall, J. S., & Jacobs, V. A. (2003). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Harvard Education Press.
• Cunningham, P. M., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 934-945.
• International Literacy Association. (2018). Literacy leadership for grades 5-12: Best practices for developing professional literacy communities. International Literacy Association.
• Krashen, S. D. (1989). We acquire vocabulary and spelling by reading: Additional evidence for the input hypothesis. Modern Language Journal, 73(4), 440-464.
• National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. National Institute for Literacy.
• National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
• Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. Routledge.
• Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. National Academies Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1435 words

2 pages / 1035 words

1 pages / 524 words

5 pages / 2232 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Personal Experience

After a week passed I wrote a letter to her in which I poured my heart out. It was the last conversation that happened between us and it was time when I changed myself for everyone. First I easily trust everyone but since this [...]

The moment that changed everything - this essay is about such a moment in my life. At the age of 16, it was April and the spring’s breeze was floating through the air. I can feel the breeze push through my hair, keeping my [...]

For the past two years, my involvement in the annual Ramadan fundraiser with Islamic Relief has not only been a volunteer experience but also a profound reflection on volunteering experience. This organization dedicates its [...]

This is a short story about myself. My essay is particularly about me in third grade. In third grade, my family and I moved to Morgan, Utah. I had to go to a different school, where I knew nobody. I had to make new [...]

Wake up! Wake up! The shrieking commands of my now irate mother abruptly awake me. As I strain to open my eyes, I am pierced by the fiery hot coals of the suns rays. I roll out of bed, only to hear more commands barked out by my [...]

Obstacles are often faced by each one of us in our day to day life, as we make each and every effort to reach the pinnacle of success. One must strive hard with great perseverance and resolution besides being very challenging [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

The physical sensations of watching a total solar eclipse

Regina G. Barber

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world." Paul Myers hide caption

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

David Baron can pinpoint the first time he got addicted to chasing total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers up the sun. It was 1998 and he was on the Caribbean island of Aruba. "It changed my life. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen," he says.

Baron, author of the 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World , wants others to witness its majesty too. On April 8, millions of people across North America will get that chance — a total solar eclipse will appear in the sky. Baron promises it will be a surreal, otherworldly experience. "It's like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

Baron, who is a former NPR science reporter, talks to Life Kit about what to expect when viewing a total solar eclipse, including the sensations you may feel and the strange lighting effects in the sky. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens." Photographs by David Baron; Bronson Arcuri, Kara Frame, CJ Riculan/NPR; Collage by Becky Harlan/NPR hide caption

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens."

What does it feel like to experience a total solar eclipse — those few precious minutes when the moon completely covers up the sun?

It is beautiful and absolutely magnificent. It comes on all of a sudden. As soon as the moon blocks the last rays of the sun, you're plunged into this weird twilight in the middle of the day. You look up and the blue sky has been torn away. On any given day, the blue sky overhead acts as a screen that keeps us from seeing what's in space. And suddenly that's gone. So you can look into the middle of the solar system and see the sun and the planets together.

Can you tell me about the sounds and the emotions you're feeling?

A total solar eclipse is so much more than something you just see with your eyes. It's something you experience with your whole body. [With the drop in sunlight], birds will be going crazy. Crickets may be chirping. If you're around other people, they're going to be screaming and crying [with all their emotions from seeing the eclipse]. The air temperature drops because the sunlight suddenly turns off. And you're immersed in the moon's shadow. It doesn't feel real.

Everything you need to know about solar eclipse glasses before April 8

In your 2017 Ted Talk , you said you felt like your eyesight was failing in the moments before totality. Can you go into that a little more?

The lighting effects are very weird. Before you get to the total eclipse, you have a progressive partial eclipse as the moon slowly covers the sun. So over the course of an hour [or so], the sunlight will be very slowly dimming. It's as if you're in a room in a house and someone is very slowly turning down the dimmer switch. For most of that time your eyes are adjusting and you don't notice it. But then there's a point at which the light's getting so dim that your eyes can't adjust, and weird things happen. Your eyes are less able to see color. It's as if the landscape is losing its color. Also there's an effect where the shadows get very strange.

Crescent-shaped shadows cast by the solar eclipse before it reaches totality appear on a board at an eclipse-viewing event in Antelope, Ore., 2017. Kara Frame and CJ Riculan/NPR hide caption

You see these crescents on the ground.

There are two things that happen. One is if you look under a tree, the spaces between leaves or branches will act as pinhole projectors. So you'll see tiny little crescents everywhere. But there's another effect. As the sun goes from this big orb in the sky to something much smaller, shadows grow sharper. As you're nearing the total eclipse, if you have the sun behind you and you look at your shadow on the ground, you might see individual hairs on your head. It's just very odd.

Some people might say that seeing the partial eclipse is just as good. They don't need to go to the path of totality.

A partial solar eclipse is a very interesting experience. If you're in an area where you see a deep partial eclipse, the sun will become a crescent like the moon. You can only look at it with eye protection. Don't look at it with the naked eye . The light can get eerie. It's fun, but it is not a thousandth as good as a total eclipse.

A total eclipse is a fundamentally different experience, because it's only when the moon completely blocks the sun that you can actually take off the eclipse glasses and look with the naked eye at the sun.

And you will see a sun you've never seen before. That bright surface is gone. What you're actually looking at is the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. It's the most dazzling sight in the heavens. It's this beautiful textured thing. It looks sort of like a wreath or a crown made out of tinsel or strands of silk. It shimmers in space. The shape is constantly changing. And you will only see that if you're in the path of the total eclipse.

Shots - Health News

Watching a solar eclipse without the right filters can cause eye damage. here's why.

So looking at a partial eclipse is not the same?

It is not at all the same. Drive those few miles. Get into the path of totality.

This is really your chance to see a total eclipse. The next one isn't happening across the U.S. for another 20 years.

The next significant total solar eclipse in the United States won't be until 2045. That one will go from California to Florida and will cross my home state of Colorado. I've got it on my calendar.

The digital story was written by Malaka Gharib and edited by Sylvie Douglis and Meghan Keane. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected].

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify , and sign up for our newsletter .

NPR will be sharing highlights here from across the NPR Network throughout the day Monday if you're unable to get out and see it in real time.

Correction April 3, 2024

In a previous audio version of this story, we made reference to an upcoming 2025 total solar eclipse. The solar eclipse in question will take place in 2045.

• Life Kit: Life Skills
• total eclipse
• solar eclipse

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

Listen to this article

Listen to more stories on curio

Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here .

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

Explore the May 2024 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.