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???)
Returning now to my gigantic To Be Read List...
Note: All photos from DepositPhoto
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