My Reading Life

I learned to read in kindergarten, and I actually remember it rather well. I recall being dimly aware that we were in homogeneous reading groups and that mine was comprised of the best readers in the class; still, I was jealous of this kid Matt, who got to go to first grade during reading time. Always a striver, I wanted to know what I had to do to go to first grade for reading. . . turns out Matt had stayed back to work on his behavior, but he was a good reader. Eventually he skipped back up a grade. Meanwhile, I was in my reading circle in kindergarten using a basal reader featuring characters with names that seemed highly unusual to me, including "Rosa" and "Laddie" (the latter may have been the golden retriever who frolicked on the pages of that textbook). These early memories of reading are definitely rooted in phonics instruction. I remember very little about how I was taught to comprehend --everything was decoding words and little else. We did seemingly endless phonics worksheets; I am pretty sure we spent about 30 minutes a day on phonics from kindergarten through fourth grade. By third and fourth grade, I resented this work and flew through it. I was easily reading at an 8^th or 9^th grade level and felt I was beyond doing this rote work.

I have often wondered whether my love of reading was the result of my nature or of a nurturing environment. Between kindergarten and second grade, my nuclear family was in a tough phase. My parents had two rowdy boys in quick succession, and shortly thereafter my mom was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that caused tremendous fatigue. Reading was an escape for me, no doubt, but it also garnered me lots of attention and praise from my busy and exhausted parents.I tore through books at this age, and I found encouragement everywhere I went. When the librarian saw how quickly I devoured the Anne of Green Gables series, she ordered me other L.M. Montgomery books (they're not as good as the Anne ones, by the way). My often aloof father heaped praise on me for reading and showered me with books at Christmastime and on my birthday. My beloved babysitter (a high school frosh) couldn't believe the titles I was reading. I felt special; I earned the external reward of attention as well as the internal reward of sailing off to new places.

As school wore on, I remember being horribly bored (say, from 3rd grade to 8th grade) because we often read at grade level, when in my home life I read anything from any shelf in the library. I loved my English teachers and enjoyed grammar and writing instruction, however, I felt that reading was something I preferred to do on my own, at my own level and at my own speed.

In high school, I was lucky to have wonderful teachers who introduced me to thrilling, serious works of literature that were sometimes a bit above my head, which was refreshing after the simplicity of grade school. I loved Of Mice and Men in English class, and read every other book Steinbeck wrote in my free time. I puzzled over Oedipus Rex my freshman year, and frankly didn't enjoy Wuthering Heights as a sophomore. Junior year, I wrote a research paper on In Cold Blood, and this began a lifelong interest in creative non-fiction. Sill, as much as I loved reading for my high school classes, it was never enough. I read TONS on my own, from indie rock magazines to all of Sylvia Plath. I picked my college based entirely on the strength of the English department and declared my major right away, and I continued to read voraciously straight through my 20s.

Now that I am a parent, my reading life surprises me. I have to work much harder at it than I would have expected. I spend a great deal of my reading time on student writing or other work-based reading. In recent years (thanks to the iPhone), I read primarily online, and mostly non-fiction. My teenage self would be shocked and disappointed, I suspect. In 2017, I made a New Year’s Resolution to read more, but I am only achieving my goal thanks to an Audible subscription. I haven’t decided yet whether that “counts” as reading. I am also in a small book club with a few close colleagues from PJ; we read only fiction, but we’re all so busy that our pace is quite slow. . . maybe three or four books a year. As a kid, I easily read three or four books a week!