I thought I’d add – when I turned fourteen, my parents officially let me loose to read pretty much anything. They weren’t heavily censoring my reading before that, either. They knew it would have been useless to try, anyway. They…trusted me! What an idea! Mom and I read the same books anyway. We have been known to buy our own individual copies of the same book on the same shopping trip. Even when I was living at home.
One time, one time Mom grounded me from reading for a week.
Three days later she caught me spending waaaaaaay too much time in the bathroom. With a book. And immediately gave up on that punishment.
Lastly, I was a shy, introverted kid. I’m now a somewhat less shy, still introverted adult. And I love my books.
My brother was already reading at a sixth grade level when he entered first grade. I, on the other hand, was a below average reader during my first few years in school, but I caught on eventually. My parents were always providing new material, so I never lacked a good book. I tackled The Phantom Tollbooth at seven, C. S. Lewis at eight, and Tolkien at nine. During our teenage years, both my brother and I went through reading slumps where we refused to read anything outside of schoolwork. Around eleventh grade I really got into classic lit. I read Moby Dick in under a week, and I’ve never looked back. And as for my brother, well, he’s reading James Joyce for fun now.
Nurture or nature? No flippin’ way to tell with me–I had both. My mother read mysteries, my father reads SF/fantasy/history, my older brother reads SF–all obsessively. You could walk around our house at about 1AM and find every member of the household asleep with the lights on and books lying where they’d fallen. One of my grandfathers was widely considered deranged for regularly walking the eight miles from the houseboat to town to find something new to read.
I don’t remember exactly when I first began reading–I may have been 3 or 4–but I remember the process. My parents read to me all the time–kid books mostly, but some of their novels, too. I began tracking the words on the page, memorizing the shapes that went with spoken words–no phonetics, I didn’t even think about the letters, I just associated spoken words with pictograms. It made reading a very intensive process, and I had to learn new words purely by context, but it worked. In kindergarten, my teacher saw what I was doing and took me aside for an hour to explain phonetics (something she wasn’t supposed to do, according to the curriculum), then left me to practice on my own. She handed me a tool to accelerate the learning process. It helped–I was reading novels in first grade, and shocking my would-be teachers badly (I’ve related my Shield of Three Lions anecdote on the boards before). I still read by my pictogram system for the most part, though–it’s somewhat similar to the so-called “speed reading” techniques. I usually go through about a novel a day, along with some nonfiction and tech books. On weekends, that often jumps to three or four books a day.
Neither of my parents are readers, but when I was four, my mother was convinced by a traveling salesman that for the good of her daughter she should purchase a set of books called “My Bookhouse Books”. The books started out with stories for younger readers all the way up to about age 12. I can still remember reading the story about the glass mountain that the suitors of a princess in a far-away land had to climb to win her hand. And the poetry about “up, up in a swing so high…”. There were great color illustrations to accompany the stories. I loved those books so much and couldn’t wait until I was able to read the next one. By the time I was in 6th grade, I had read every book in our house, including “How Green Was My Valley”.
After school I used to hang out at the library, my favorite place. At Campfire Girl meetings I would be in the living room perusing the bookcase, while the other girls made cookies in the kitchen. On visits to my Uncle’s house I always went directly to the bedroom where he kept all his science-fiction books and settled down on the bed for the duration with Asimov or Heinlein. When my children were little, I decided to start with the “A’s” in the fiction section of the library and read every book. We moved before I finished, but I found a lot of great books that way.
To this day I always have 4-5 books piled up on the nightstand, reading whatever I’m in the mood for before going to sleep. Right now I’m reading Vilette (Charlotte Bronte). I love Charlotte and even went out of my way to visit Haworth, England, where she lived and was married.
I don’t know if my love of reading would have been ignited without the “My Bookhouse Books”, but I have a feeling that either you love reading or you don’t from the very beginning. I don’t know if it is related, but I can read text without looking at each individual word. Also, I can write the mirror images of words easily. I just have a great ease with words.
Until a few years ago (getting older you know) people I worked with would be amazed that I never used spell-check even though my job required that I write many pages of text analyzing financial data. I never misspelled a word. I’m sure of course that it was related to reading so much.
My mother used to read to us all the time…from the time we were born, she was reading to us. Consequently, my sister and I were both reading on a 5th grade level when we entered Kindergarten. We were tested and it was suggested to mom that she send us to a special school (for the gifted? just because we could read? LOL) in NYC. Luckily she didn’t. I honestly thought it was no big deal until I got into first grade and they sent me to a 3rd grade class for part of the day to do reading/spelling/English work. I thought for a while that computers had ruined my love of books, but I’ve been picking up books again lately.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read for pleasure. My mother has a great story she tells about when we were stationed in Arizona, so I would have been around 3 years old, and my father had just rotated home from the Phillippines. She told him that I could read the newspaper and he said, “OK, Pat, sure.” She proceeded to give me a page of the paper and I read it out loud to my dad. I had no idea what a lot of the words meant, but I could pronounce most of them correctly.
My grandparents had a huge collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (four condensed novels per volume), and every time we stayed at my grandparents’ house, I would read a couple of volumes. My parents also had my sister and me in some children’s book club, so we were always getting new material. They made sure I always had money at school to order things from the Scholastic catalog.
By the time I was in the third grade, my dad was introducing me to science-fiction, so I started reading at a more adult level. Ever since then, I cannot remember not having a couple different books going at any given time. I would read at the table while eating breakfast, on the bus on the way to school, during homeroom, whenever I finished a test early, during study hall, when I got home, and in bed before going to sleep. I would even read during dinner until I was told to stop it, that it was impolite.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who shared their stories. Reading this thread is creepily like reading about myself. I found it hysterical that several people mentioned sneaking books in the bathroom (in light of the usual joke about teens spending too much time in the bathroom behind locked doors). And susiek, thanks for mentioning My Bookhouse – I remember that series well, along with the Childcraft books.
This is what I have learned from this thread so far:
Everytime I base an opinion on “well everyone I know does blah blah blah …” I am, of course, always proven wrong. It was interesting to read about people, or their siblings, who were not always readers, but became readers later. However, I feel slightly justified because it seems like this is somewhat rarer than the “born with a book in my hand” syndrome.
Reading to kids is important. I notice that many people were read to as children, but several people mentioned that when two or more siblings were read to, not all of them became passionate readers …
Leading me to believe that readers are usually born, and not made, but it is helpful if those born readers have supportive (or at least reading) parents …
Which makes me wonder … for all of us with the book gene, what would we have done if we had been born in a time without books? Can you picture us all as cavepeople, wandering around saying “You know, I feel bored, but I just can’t figure out what it is I feel like doing … something with a smallish, square thing … hmmm…”
Oh that’s simple. We’d be telling stories. At least, that’s my guess, since the only thing that can drag me away from a book is the chance to do some role-playing, which is really acting without a script.
And if anyone’s keeping track, toss me in the pile of those who could read at the age of 3. I went through elementary and secondary school with my hand crazy glued to books. I used to piss off my teachers because I’d be perched in the back of the class, feet on desk, book in hand, and the teacher would be lecturing about something else. Teach would snap a question at me about the topic, I’d answer correctly, Teach would look annoyed and continue.
Of course, now I have a job where I get to write! Woohoo!
My sister taught me to read when I was 3. The earliest reading I remember was (don’t laugh!) her nearly complete collection of Nancy Drew Mysteries, plus a few Hardy Boys & The Bobsey Twins. When I was in grade one I was reading Alfred Hitchcock™ horror anthologies. Didn’t learn not to criticize my peers reading-levels until I had endured many, many drubbings.
Sucked up science fiction & horror until I was about 17, and then, something happened.
Ohhh yes I agree with that one… If I wasn’t reading I’d be telling them… and if we had Bard’s perhaps I might be one… I sing pretty well and though I don’t really play instruments it is not for lack of ability just lack of lessons and practice as I can play the odd tune. -smiles-
