It might surprise nobody, but I have always been reading as a writer as I would as an analyst of the text. One only has to look at literally any of my comments for NANA contests (or even @calluna’s as she is my official mouth piece :p) and @curie upvoted posts. But nobody is here for life story of anything beforehand, so let’s talk about my the things I read in the past. All but without the exception of a few works, Dr. Seuss’s works (especially The Foot Book) as a kid, the Hobbit (yah just talked about it :p) and might as no George RR Tolkien (even casual reading was insufferable even for an eighth grade and unlimited stamina me).

Though I really could go on a limb, this is the first time I not only knew I was consciously analyzing the text but I can recall it. What do I mean?

This was in a period where how I read was going to not be how I saw it, but how was I supposed to see it as to get maximum score. To put more complexly, I couldn’t just enjoy and talked what I enjoyed in a work but be forced to find an example that might not be there but still dig for it. I would say this period would be “reading as both archaeologist and interpreter.” Let’s put it heavily that my teacher, Mrs Streit, was a person that enslaved the Devil - she was that bad.

Yet this is the first time that I could see, in the passing periods of frustration, the sheer unconscious activities of a writer and some pleasantries they snuck in for those nose-in-book readers. Yet, for now, it would be a mere experience of enjoying it in the rot work of forcing examples into the differing parts of speech.

The ones I care to remember was Anne Frank’s Diary, re-reading The Schwa Was Here (by Neal Shusterman) for fun, GoT Ice and Fire which caused too many headaches and reading Epictetus’s Enchiridion for the first time. Just the differing compositions, respectfully, of diary, prose/novella, what not to do and philosophy really gave me a run for my attention and care of how to imagine stories in my head. Equally so with the exception of GoT, that I started to love these works as I not only understood what was said and how they communicated it, but why it was structured as it was and the history behind each text.

Alas, I can only choose one work and I forsaken myself to my eighth grade years! Yet, lemme honour this memory for once and talk about Anne Frank’s diary.

How can I describe other than a diary? Now please take every assumption/conception you have of diaries and defenestrate them all. The only one I should agree upon and shall stay was the fact that this diary was meant to be kept private. Yet, because it was a required reading, I decided to make the most of it due to historicity of the text and wanting to know the pains of a victim of the Nazis (and if anybody gets anywhere offended to describe these excuses of dæmons, then you might just be in support of them).

And yes, this is an auto-documentary and there are some really heart wrenching moments. All throughout, you can see the dialectically progress from a happy life to a deeply claustrophobic and near PTSD-inducing life. You cannot escape her words, she might not have said everything to her family but her diary was her unconscious word of her actual thoughts. I imagined it being a hellish life, but I didn’t even knew what a hellish life was before reading this.

And yet, I was glad to have read it and see the beauty in her words and how she documented almost every single event of her claustrophobic life. Forgive me as it has been a long, long time - about four plus years ago - and I don’t have a copy on me. Yet...

So I do have to say this, reading this work when I had, about her diary: it was practically an auto-documentary and I loved it for such (historical and narrative purposes).

I may have not been an annotations person, I despise annotations, but I do love mentally logging everything in my noggin. Just the flow of not only stating everything she experienced with her five senses, but making a little story out of everything (even to do things like this is as an internal explanation and reference to her life). And more-so, with her as the only (well not now I guess) audience, she only had to worry about writing for her future self and thus took the time to use only meaningful/important details that particularly was highlighting to her.

But every good documentary involves time, and this work is not only chronological but has a time and place (temporality) with it as well. Where the past may have an effect and other times matter so little to other towering concerns - yet may act as an agent to intensify those towering concerns. Mix that in with the content of her work and it makes for a compelling yet dialectically depressive work the entire way through. And throughout reading the work for the small details and paying attention to how and why she wrote the things she wrote, it had helped me develop the conscious tools of analyzing and dissecting a work - which ultimately lead to me loving her, learning more of her and understanding her struggle as she is not alive to tell us her sad story amongst the million other survivors. Complexly, to see the auto-documentary of her diary.

And thus, moving past her work, my style of reading for the philosophy, history/politics, form and content of a work had stuck to me. Anne Frank’s Diary was, to me, a great contextualizing book of the 1940s for those under Nazi (fuck those dæmons) occupation but a story everyone should at least once read. More-so, it had helped me to appreciate works that I had unconsciously done what I for once consciously experienced!

And if I hadn’t said it enough, I greatly appreciated her Diary and I guess I can give gratitude to how I have been reading, more or less, nowadays. And of course I hadn’t read solely as a writer but it definitely is a part of how I read and how I continue to read even after I had changed my style slightly.