The Joy of Reading

I’ve always been a reader from around 6 years old, finding immersion in other times and lives and worlds such wonderful adventures out of my own reality and whatever its limitations and frustrations. I devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House books,’ and read ‘ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ and ‘…THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS’ and all the Pooh books over and over again. Over the course of childhood I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Nancy Drew, and authors like H. Ryder Haggard–‘KING SOLOMON’S MINES’ and ‘SHE.’ Jules Verne, HG Wells… So many that were fantasy and science fiction classics in the 1960s.

At the school library I checked out a book every day and read it that afternoon (so much more interesting than doing homework!) I also read all the assigned books a year early because they were assigned to my older sister.

In 7th grade I was choosing books I’d never heard of, going by their covers. One was the first ever that I’d read with an unsettling ending because it had a pretty pastel watercolor design on the cover. It was LORD OF THE FLIES. Lesson learned! I went for the beach and ocean jewel tones next: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA.

A few years later, I found my way to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and there are parts of me who’ve never left!

It was almost always fiction, though in high school I found my mom’s old college biology textbooks and they were fascinating!

I’m not here just to brag, but to give some idea of the influences on my life that came from reading. I have a pretty good vocabulary and have a pretty good idea of how words can be made to flow together like music and also what makes a false note or simply fails to achieve that transcendence that takes the reader out of their own skin and into other worlds.

It’s a sadness that so few people read now, that glamour and glitz and visual storytelling–movies and tv–have replaced reading. These things light up different areas of the mind, and parts not used atrophy. It becomes harder to engage with a book than to fall into what’s happening on a screen, large or small. I appreciate that not everyone reads as easily as some of us, for whom reading is more like work than a simple pleasure. Even so–starting simple like a beginning reader can open that door to worlds of wonder.

When the lights go out and screens fade to black, there will still be books.