Until I was 10, I hated to read.
Smelling salts for the librarians, please.
I wasn’t anti-books. In fact, I loved having someone read to me.
And libraries were my passion. I loved going to the local library and picking out two or three books with interesting covers, even when I couldn’t pronounce the titles. It was the actual sitting down to read that bothered me.
To put things into perspective, my mother sold me on the idea that school was the place where 1) I would make lots of friends, and 2) I would learn to read.
Neither thing happened much for me as far as I could tell in first grade. Initially, school was heavy on phonics, but without anything much to read.
As we learned the sounds of letters, consonant blends and vowel diphthongs, I misunderstood some of the explanations my teacher gave, like telling us if a word had a tail on the end, the vowel had a long sound. While she meant the silent E, I missed that as a tail completely. So, I gave any word ending in y, p or g a long vowel sound. It took some time before my mother figured out what the problem was.
With mild, undiagnosed, and at the time, unheard-of dyslexia, I had a few other problems with reading and writing, like starting from the wrong side of the page, that made my mother curse herself for not switching me from left to right handed years earlier when she had the chance. She didn’t realize that wouldn’t have solved the problem.
However, most of my difficulties had been resolved with my mother’s hard work by the time we finally got readers. She did such a good job that I was moved from the second reading group to the first in only a few weeks. No Bluejays for me; I was a Cardinal!
Getting readers wasn’t the thrill I was led to believe. The first “story” wasn’t what I was expecting, having been raised on Little Golden Books.
Look
Look, oh look.
Look and see.
Seriously? How about the Tawny Scrawny Lion? Even A Day at the Playground, which was so plotless that I made up an actual story to go with the pictures when I was four, was more interesting than the stories in our reader.
Subsequent “stories” weren’t much better. “See Spot Run” wasn’t a story, either. Even the introduction of the family, Father, Mother, John, Jean and Judy as well as Puff the kitten and Judy’s stuffed bear, Tim, didn’t offer plot. The first actual story was the last one in the book. I read it the day I got my reader, and was ready to trade the book in on the next one.
But no.
We had to read every single “story” in the book before moving on. This was no way to spark a love of reading in anyone, in my humble opinion.
I discovered I could actually read the Little Golden Books, and eventually the Big Book of Fairy Tales, even if the words in the newspaper my dad read looked like spiders crawling along the page.
In the second grade, I discovered the community library. An old building with creaky stairs leading up to the actual room of books, it had a wonderful scent of old paper, leather and furniture polish. That scent should be made into a cologne, perhaps “Booklover’s Dream.”
I was only allowed into the junior fiction section, a more open area with lower shelves than the stacks. But I looked enviously at the big kids who emerged from the stacks with an armload of books. Because of them, I always took two books out at a time, even though I chose chapter books that I couldn’t read one of completely in the two weeks allotted.
I didn’t have a favorite genre. I scrupulously avoided thin, chapterless books that looked too much like my school readers.
But
I struggled to be interested in the books I did choose.
I didn’t. The first chapter of each of the gazillion books in the series was long and tedious, laboriously setting the scene without any hint of action, as opposed to what I was taught years later in university writing classes, that if you didn’t grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, you’d lost them.
The Bobsey Twins lost me. No amount of my teacher’s telling me you had to get through the first chapter and then it would get interesting could sway me.
The Cherry Ames, R.N. series wasn’t any better. As a child who dreamed of being a rock star, stories about girls in any of the acceptable girl occupations of the time did not inspire.
If only someone had introduced me to The Chronicles of Narnia! Where the Wild Things Are wasn’t written until I was in third grade, and if my parents had even heard of it, I was beyond that reading level by then.
In fifth grade I received a novel as a Pollyanna gift at school. While it was a step above the hated jigsaw puzzles I received nearly every other year of elementary school, I didn’t hold out much hope. Good grief, a book!
“You’ll love this!” my mother said when she saw the book was Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott.
To my surprise, I did love it. And I’ve read it more than 15 times throughout my life. I’ve also read nearly everything else that author ever wrote.
Thus was born my love for reading, which gave my father and me talking points. Whenever looking for my father at the mall, I knew he would be in the bookstore. The best gift to give him was a gift certificate to Walden’s Bookstore. And when we read the same books, we could launch into lengthy conversations about what worked and what didn’t.
After reading Alcott, I branched out to Science Fiction, and eventually into vampires, starting with Dracula. I tried playing catch-up, reading as an adult the “classics” I’d missed as a child. While I still haven’t managed to retain enough interest to crawl through A Wrinkle in Time, I’ve gloried in the Narnia stories, loved the Wild Thing and Shel Silverstein’s books, and am currently interspersing Roald Dahl’s children’s books with a variety grownup books.
On my bookshelves, The Horatio Hornblower series shares space with a collection of Dickens, Morgan Llewelyn and almost everything by Bernard Cornwell except the Sharpe series (because I didn't get to that yet).
The reason I became a writer was probably due to my initial hatred of reading: Trying to find something that would hold my interest led me to write the stories I couldn’t find in the library. I only wish my dad had lived long enough to see my first novel completed. I would love to have had his feedback.
My journey went from hating my readers at six to reading the unabridged version of War and Peace and most of Dickens in my teens and twenties, and more recently, venturing through the eight-book Outlander series, at about 1400 pages per book.
And of course, as any avid reader does, I have shelves of books that are waiting for me to finish what I’m currently reading so they can have their turn.
Librarians
and booksellers can now relax. I’ll be in to see you.
