My Reading Journey

Day 26 of 31 at Two Writing Teachers!

Earlier this month, Christy wrote about her "book self" and linked  to the Ideal Bookshelf project.  Wow, what a cool idea, right?

Books and reading are such an important part of who I am.  My first sentence was "Daddy sitting reading paper."  My kindergarten teacher came to our house to study it because she wanted to know why I was so far ahead in my reading.  My elementary school freaked out because I entered 1st grade reading at a 5th grade reading level.  (They were afraid of not having enough books to challenge me.  My mom and I just went to the public library every week with a laundry basket!)

Some of my earliest memories are of reading with my parents.  I can still hear my parents' voices reading favorite lines of favorite books.  We loved to curl up and read delightful books like:

• Pat the Bunny
• Make Way for Ducklings
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile 
• The Giving Tree
• Love You Forever

As a child and tween, I was a book monster.  I devoured just about any book I could get my hands on.  (I think the only book I ever abandoned was The Old Man and The Sea... sorry, Hemingway!)  Every summer, my goal was to read over 100 books, and I easily met it every time.

In those blissful days, my reading self enjoyed:

• the Little House series
• the Emily of New Moon trilogy
• the Anne of Green Gables series
• all the Hardy Boys books
• A Wrinkle in Time and everything else written by Madeleine L'Engle 
• A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh and most other books by Allan W. Eckert
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
• and any other book about American Indians I could get my hands on!

I can't even begin to list the books I hungrily consumed during that time, but I know that at some point in middle school, I started running out of books.  My mom took me to the library in the next city over because I'd read all the books I wanted to read at our library.  Mary Higgins Clark (loved that her titles all came from song lyrics!) and Lillian Jackson Braun (The Cat Who...) got me through most of middle school, but I was really stuck when I finished their series.  It didn't really help that I was so far ahead in my reading that I had already read most "middle school" literature in elementary school.

I did start to seriously devour poetry at this time, including The Dream Keeper and Muse of Fire (which I think was one of my mom's old textbooks, but it was in the house, and it had good poetry inside!)

Sadly, my clearest reading memory from middle school is being forced through the weeks of worksheets and quizzes on White Fang even though I had just read it the previous summer for pleasure.  I prided myself on acing them all without even cracking the book back open.

I was going to write all the way up to my current self, but this post is already too long... so tune in tomorrow!  :-)