Salvatore Scibona’s Intellectual Home

Salvatore Scibona had written a short story called, “Where I Learned to Read” which was published by The New Yorker on June, 13 & 20th, 2011. The short story is about how Salvatore Scibona at first felt his school life was becoming nothing but a failure and didn’t fully understand how he worked hard only for his job, but when it came to doing assignments such as reading he would struggle to read a page. The strange thing is that Salvatore would go to his backyard and read books such as Leaves of Grass and etc, and he would actually enjoy reading books in his free time but just couldn’t read them when they were assigned to him. At the end of high school, Salvatore felt like he didn’t know what was next for him in life, and he was given a second chance to fix his bad habits and become a successful student, by attending St. John’s college. The school seems to fit him so well; he even described the school as a “vocation”. Salvatore ended up finding his intellectual home, which also means a place where he would learn best at. This is determined because the summer before school started Salvatore was told to read various books and genres that he had probably never read or heard of, such as the Iliad, or even memorizing greek letters, and etc. Salvatore had written “Reader, I married it.” which meant that he had broken the door that he felt was holding him back from reading more assigned books and shows how much of a better student Salvatore had become. He still worked hard at his job but made it a goal to read every night after work, and this ultimately explains how much he had changed as a person or a reader and all it took was him to be in his intellectual home. Salvatore’s senior year in college was totally different from his senior year in high school, he had gone from failing all his classes by not doing the assignment or reading any of the books in high school to in college making reading more of a thrill rather than drag. In conclusion, the author emphasizes how much he had changed from high school to college and how college was more of his intellectual home because of the way Salvatore had become more of a reader than before and cared more about school assignment way more than before, and it just seemed that he worked best at St. John’s college which can be seen in his passionate love for reading now.