On Reading

This is a little something I wrote for the girls’ schools’ Book Fairs that I thought I’d share here as well.  

Do you want to know a secret?  I was never a reader.  I didn’t mind listening to stories but I hated to sit down and read them.  Do you remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books?  The ones with the pages that had a choice at the bottom: If you want to see how the knight gets out of the castle, turn to page 44. If you want to see the knight fight the ogre, turn to page 67. I always chose the page that got me to the ending first.

My parents, quite literary folk, were not sure what to do. We lived next door to a library for crying out loud, but I was more interested in running around outside of it then sitting in that big, quiet building reading.  Besides, the terribly self-centered fact of the matter is that the stories I read were nowhere near as cool as the stories I had in my head.

My disdain for sitting with words lasted most of my childhood until around the time I learned to drive.  My parents told me that if I wanted to drive their car (a black Dodge Shadow convertible), I would need to pay for gas.  That meant I needed a job and it just so happened that the library next door was hiring people to shelve books.

I’m not sure what could be more boring to a non-reader than a job where one has to put books away for hours on end.  I brought my headphones and listened to music so as to prevent my eyes from watering from the tedium.  At least I could listen to Janet Jackson and Madonna while putting away dusty old books.

Except something happened to me that summer: I started to pause after a title of a book captured my attention.  I began flipping the books over to read the summary on the back.  I took the ear buds out of my ears and hid behind the book carousel so I could read the first few pages.  And when my shift ended, I asked my boss if I could take a book or two home.  The first book was The Princess Bride. “Did you know this was a book first?!?!” I said to my mom waving the book widely when I walked in the door.

It wasn’t long before I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird, and, well, if you know my children, you understand that reading captured me that summer and has not let me go (I wanted to name our oldest daughter, Hadley, “Radley” but my husband thought I was taking it too far).

Whether you loved books from an early age or took to stories later in life, I bet we all have a story about a time reading had an impact on us.  And as parents of little people who are beginning their own journey into the world of stories, we have an opportunity to help foster this world.

Besides, you don’t want to miss out on a chance to watch what happens when your child grabs hold of a book. And it grabs hold of him. It’s magic, I tell you.