I learnt to read before I started school and I was always encouraged to enjoy and love books by my parents who were also keen readers. I worked my way through plenty of books when I was young including old favourites such as Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. Often I would pretend I was out there with the Famous Five or wandering around the chocolate factory, escaping from the ordinary for a few hours.
As I grew older, I experimented with different books. Classics
like Catch 22 and Animal Farm and books that my parents had enjoyed like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes I
failed - my dad is still one of the only people I know who has actually read
Lord of the Rings in its entirety and I am unlikely to join him in that feat. Likewise,
I have never made it to the end of Crime and Punishment despite starting it
several times. But, I tried and sometimes I think that is all that matters.
It should come as no surprise that I studied English and American
Literature at university. Here again I succeeded at some and failed at others.
I have a lifelong love of Chaucer and Shakespeare, I like Jane Austen and Edith
Wharton, but I would rather stick pins in my eyes than ever read Moby Dick again. It may be a great work of
literature, but my god I hated it.
After university I rebelled against fiction. Having spent three
years studying so many books and dissecting them I was over fiction.
Non-fiction was where it was at. Many people dismiss non-fiction when they talk
about reading, but I believe that it doesn't really matter what you are reading
as long as you are doing it. By reading non-fiction, I have learnt many useless
facts, discovered more about new hobbies and learnt about the lives of famous
people through biographies.
Now, I mix the two. I read whenever I have the time, which more
often than not is in three page bursts. The record on my library card probably
makes me look like a book schizophrenic. Some chick lit here, a little gory
murder thriller there, a book about Google one week and a book about raising
creative children the next but I enjoy nearly all of them.
For me reading is as much about the process as it is about the
subject. It is about learning and discovering, taking yourself out of the
present and in to another world for a few moments, learning more about yourself
as you realise what you like and don't like when it comes to stories.
And now, I have the pleasure of reading to others. I have a son,
which of course sets me on the worried mother path that because he is a boy he
will hate reading and will never pick up a book unless I force him. I hope that
will not happen, and so far it does not seem to be the case. He likes reading
almost as much as I do and we read everything from comics and books, to recipes
and street signs. He already has his own library card and we end every day with
books at bedtime, many of which he can recite to me because he knows them by
heart.
I am lucky that my husband is a keen reader, so my son has a great male
role model when it comes to books and reading. I hope as my son grows he will
continue to love reading as much as he does now and enjoy reading some of the
same books I did when I was a child.
I won't, however, ever make him read Moby Dick.
So there you have it, a potted history of my reading habits.
How did you get started in reading? Do you still love to read
now?
