“Where I Learned How to Read” by Salvatore Scibona was published from The New Yorker on June 13th & 20th 2011, and it is based off Scibona being able to find his “intellectual home”. Before he learned to read, Salvatore struggled a lot as teenager. He constantly failed his classes and saw no purpose into learning and especially reading, “I didn’t know what I was doing or what I believed in”. He burned report cards and thought that it was very unlikely for him to have a future since he could not make it through the eleventh grade. Eventually, Salvatore was slowly starting to find where he truly belonged, the true definition of his intellectual home and that place was St. John’s college, all thanks to a brochure he was given by a girl from his homeroom. Fifteen hundred miles away from his home is where he found his new home, where he learned to read more than he ever thought he could and grow fond of it, something he never thought he would, ” if I hadn’t made time to read the night before, my legs wore out by noon. Even my body needed to read”. Along the way, he met the perfect people that enjoyed reading as much as he did and kept him motivated enough to keep him going, ” The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends; and if it hadn’t been such a gift to find my tribe.” Salvatore then concludes that all things considered, his intellectual home has brought him nothing but joy, more than he could ever get back in Ohio; “In retrospect, I was a sad little boy and a standard-issue, shiftless, egotistical, dejected teen-ager”, but this all changed along with his new scenery of life and that was the highlight of it all.
