Saturday, July 28, 2018

Flipping the Topic


The topic this week was expressed as something along the lines of ‘how to make a kid hate reading.” Well, nothing on Earth has the power to make me hate reading and if a child likes books to begin with, a few bad or laborious or boring or centuries old books won’t put them off the entire concept of reading for the rest of their lives!

By the time I encountered Charles Dickens (my personal least favorite author in the entire world) and Leo Tolstoy because somebody somewhere decided I needed to read these doorstopper tomes in order to be a complete and well-rounded student (yeah, right), my love for reading what I wanted to read was well established and had already survived my mother’s disdain for comic books (hello Magnus Robot Fighter and Brothers of the Spear). I read voraciously, I always have and I plan to keep doing that as long as Iive.

No one’s going to come after my high school diploma if I admit right now to only skimming Little Dorrit and Bleak House and Anna Karenina, right? Because I may have written book reports based on reading the first chapter and the last chapter and a few things in between. (We didn’t have Cliff Notes in my day.) I was wayyyy ahead of my time on the whole DNF thing.

And then I’m sure I went right back to reading my endless supply of Trixie Belden books and Andre Norton science fiction adventures and more.

I don’t like Shakespeare either. So sue me. And pass me a book with a nice satisfying Happy Ever After.

I read all of The Aeneid and The Odyssey in translation. I read Last Days of Pompeii (although I suspect the erupting volcano was a big part of the allure – I love my disaster stories), which was published in 1834…I read The Three Musketeers endless times. I can read classics if I find them interesting on a personal level.

(Which reminds me of that line from ‘Cutting Edge’ where D. B. Sweeney’s character says sarcastically, “Doug can read.” Yup, me too. Can we talk movies now instead of huge, boring books???)

I like ‘Scrooged’ and “The Muppet Christmas Carol”… just not the source material.

Returning now to my gigantic To Be Read List...


Note: All photos from DepositPhoto