I love how my parents managed the reading thing. They read constantly, so books always seemed as natural as breathing. They read to us, so they were sharing their enthusiasm. Whenever one of us developed an interest in something, at least one age-appropriate book suddenly appeared out of thin air. We were never told not to read a book a second time or not to read something that might be trashy. We were never forced to read any particular books outside of what we were assigned in school.
The result? We all love books. Books are our friends. One brother uses them mostly in a research way, but that was always the case even as a child. He was more inclined to hard facts than Chelemby and me, but he still adores Little Bear and Lord of the Rings as well.
At seven, I was reading Frances Hodgeson Burnett (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, NOT Little Lord Fauntleroy which I've never been able to stomach) and relatively basic books about Henry VIII...but I was also reading Dr. Seuss. Mom never made any attempt to stop me reading little kiddie books. I think she figured a fondness for Dr. Seuss and Amelia Bedelia showed that I was enjoying both the sound and the sense of words, and those were precisely the qualities she was hoping for.
At fourteen, I read War and Peace for the first time, quickly followed by Sybil and The Stranger...then followed up all that heavy reading with another go at Charlotte's Web. Every single book on that list was my choice.
Books have always been my friends. Today, those friends include works by Great Authors and more recent 'throwaway' fiction, intense scholarly studies and lightweight overviews of Stuff That Sounds Kind of Interesting.
Buf if books had been what they all too often were in my later schooling, I might well not be interested in reading today. I know I would have detested Shakespeare if my 'formal introduction' to him in high school had been my real introduction. We were instructed to read Othello silently at our desks during class, and then as a final had to write out one of Iago's speeches word and punctuation perfect from memory and write a one-paragraph explanation of what it meant. Thank goodness my junior high drama class had been taken to see a gloriously raucus and bawdy production of The Taming of the Shrew about three years earlier and I'd seen Olivier's Henry V!
At least we never had to study random bits out of context anywhere I went to school. That sounds beyond ghastly. If we were studying a book or a story, we read the whole thing.
no subject
I love how my parents managed the reading thing. They read constantly, so books always seemed as natural as breathing. They read to us, so they were sharing their enthusiasm. Whenever one of us developed an interest in something, at least one age-appropriate book suddenly appeared out of thin air. We were never told not to read a book a second time or not to read something that might be trashy. We were never forced to read any particular books outside of what we were assigned in school.
The result? We all love books. Books are our friends. One brother uses them mostly in a research way, but that was always the case even as a child. He was more inclined to hard facts than Chelemby and me, but he still adores Little Bear and Lord of the Rings as well.
At seven, I was reading Frances Hodgeson Burnett (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, NOT Little Lord Fauntleroy which I've never been able to stomach) and relatively basic books about Henry VIII...but I was also reading Dr. Seuss. Mom never made any attempt to stop me reading little kiddie books. I think she figured a fondness for Dr. Seuss and Amelia Bedelia showed that I was enjoying both the sound and the sense of words, and those were precisely the qualities she was hoping for.
At fourteen, I read War and Peace for the first time, quickly followed by Sybil and The Stranger...then followed up all that heavy reading with another go at Charlotte's Web. Every single book on that list was my choice.
Books have always been my friends. Today, those friends include works by Great Authors and more recent 'throwaway' fiction, intense scholarly studies and lightweight overviews of Stuff That Sounds Kind of Interesting.
Buf if books had been what they all too often were in my later schooling, I might well not be interested in reading today. I know I would have detested Shakespeare if my 'formal introduction' to him in high school had been my real introduction. We were instructed to read Othello silently at our desks during class, and then as a final had to write out one of Iago's speeches word and punctuation perfect from memory and write a one-paragraph explanation of what it meant. Thank goodness my junior high drama class had been taken to see a gloriously raucus and bawdy production of The Taming of the Shrew about three years earlier and I'd seen Olivier's Henry V!
At least we never had to study random bits out of context anywhere I went to school. That sounds beyond ghastly. If we were studying a book or a story, we read the whole thing.