I learned to enjoy reading at a very young age. I found it to be an escape from whatever was happening around me at home. My parents were poor, and at times, neglectful. Within the covers of a book I could be well off, or have doting parents. I could travel the world and experience places that I otherwise would never see. In high school, I began reading several books at a time because I found one just wasn’t enough for me.<\/p>\n
I remember the visit of one of my aunts that worked for the government in the national parks. Her reading was amazing. As I sat beside her, she read through an entire book turning pages one by one as if there was only a single word to be read on each page. I was enthralled and perplexed. I even tried it myself, but never felt I captured the essence of the book. Hence, I stuck to reading nearly every word on a page while trying to improve my speed and comprehension.<\/p>\n
It was not until my first year at George Fox, in the doctoral program, that I realized I would not be able to read every word on every page. This happened when faced with St. Augustine’s book The City of God<\/em>. Try as I might, and in the limited time I had to read this book, I found that I could not get through it word by word. I got frustrated and gave up reading it altogether, twice. Finally remembering how my aunt had read, I decided to give it another go at reading faster and skimming pages for key information. I discovered I had progressed as a reader over the years in that I was finally able to attempt this method semi-successfully. Not nearly as fast yet as my aunt was, there remained hope that I would get through this book of Augustine’s in a timely manner with some degree of comprehension.<\/p>\n As for taking notes on books and the world around me at large, and carrying a small notebook for that purpose, I am more experienced. I have maintained this type of journal since college. There have been times when I write voraciously, and other times when my insights seem to me too scarce to write.<\/p>\n I immensely enjoyed the Obsidian note-taking application. After watching a few You Tube videos to get started well, I jumped right in to take notes on the books I had read for the beginning of this school year. I loved making connections.<\/p>\n Which brings me to Jolene<\/em>… In Steal Like an Artist I read a quote about how merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. It is when you take something of your heroes and make it your own that you have truly flattered that hero. Dolly Parton remains one of my heroes from childhood for many reasons. The musical group Chapel Heart took the song of hers, Jolene<\/em>, and completely made it their own, and Dolly herself loved the new song.<\/p>\n My personal goal this year academically is to take what I read and experience and transform it into something of my very own – just like the song You Can Have Him, Jolene<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I learned to enjoy reading at a very young age. I found it to be an escape from whatever was happening around me at home. My parents were poor, and at times, neglectful. Within the covers of a book I could be well off, or have doting parents. I could travel the world and experience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[571,1],"tags":[660,2326,2324,2323,2325],"class_list":["post-28638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography-drama-history","category-uncategorized","tag-adler","tag-ahrens","tag-chapel-heart","tag-dolly-parton","tag-kleon","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28640,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28638\/revisions\/28640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}