I can still recall, as if it were yesterday, my first experience as a reader. It was shortly after I learnt how to read at school – I was five and in the car with my mother. We passed by a billboard, and I read it. An epiphanic feeling rushed through me once I realised a whole new world was opening before my eyes. I could read what was written, I could understand something that was inaccessible to me before.
Ever since then, I have been fascinated with the act of reading: literature has led me not only to a better understanding of the world, but also to the chance of entering new ones. After 15 years of being an avid reader, I have decided to pursue my passion of writing about what I read.
My name is Maria Beatriz Rodrigues and I was born in March 2000, in Lisbon (Portugal). After finishing high school, I decided to enroll in a Bachelor’s degree to study Literature. In 2021, I graduated in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, in the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Ever since then, I have been working as a translator and looking for ways to pursue my interest in reading and writing.
“A Reading of One’s Own” was born of this desire to share and develop my passion for books. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, this project will publish book reviews and other similar texts, in an attempt to explore my individual reading experience and, who knows, your own.
Literature is open to everybody. (…) Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
A Reading of One's Own 
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