Assignment 3

(Note to reader=I am unable to underline book titles on this blog)
Although I have a picture of myself at four months old, sitting on the couch, with a newspaper spread out in my lap and me staring at it, I could not read. At five years old, I could tell you what the Dr. Seuss’s book Green Eggs and Ham said, but I could not read. During first grade I was sick for a month and a half with Mononucleosis and never caught up to the rest of the class. I could not read in first grade and did not want to. My mother was a teacher, who suddenly noticed that I wasn’t reading in second grade. She knew that I was bright, so she switched me to another school district with better teachers, and I began to read, but it was hard work. By the end of my fourth grade year, she was embarrassed that I was not a motivated reader. She devised a plan to take me on a family outing each weekend if I would read for an hour every day. I read all the way through the Little House on the Prairie series and visited the local theme park four times that summer. By my fifth grade year, I was a reader.
In Junior High I read Of Mice and Men, The Diary of Anne Frank, Catcher in the Rye, and Gulliver’s Travels. I cried over Where the Red Fern Grows. I spent hours of my time reading in a tree as my family-life grew complicated. I needed a book to escape. That is when I read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip and found fantasy novels. Harry Potter had not been written yet, but it was like finding that type of magic suddenly entering my life. By this time I was writing weekly in a personal journal. My teachers were praising me for the detail and “thought” in the papers I turned in, but not for my spelling.
The private school I was sent to had an excellent list of college preparatory summer reading:
Heart of Darkness
The Ox-bow Incident
Crime and Punishment
The mill on the Floss
Native Son
Books like these made me depressed. Being a teenager depressed me, but English classes were my favorite classes, and I tried to develop a “thick skin”. My mother read romance and self help books every weekend and graded papers during the week. I had to find balance, so I read a long string of adventure/survival books and more fantasy. My passion for fantasy books like Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony slipped into science fiction when I read his Macroscope. I was off on a new genre reading books by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and H. G. Wells.
It was a good thing I still wanted to read science fiction when I went to college, because in a science fiction class I met my husband. That was the only class we ever had in common. I’m glad he enjoys reading and reading to our child. We have a lot in common now.