My Love of Reading!

If you know me well at all, then you know I LOVE to read!

......HAHAHAHAHA!! Ok, so obviously you don't know me at all if you believed that. It may look that way if you were to see my fairly new bookshelf I bought to hold all my books that were in and on my nightstand OR the book cabinet in the girls rooms with a lot of my childhood books. I love books!! Really, that part is true. I enjoy going to the library and looking books up and reading the back cover. Most of the time I think a book sounds really interesting and I really do want to read it. I even go as far as to check it out and take it home. Place it on my nightstand or the table here it will be convenient to grab when I have a few minutes to read a page or two. It's the actual "sit down and read it" part that I have a hard time with. Now don't get me wrong, I know that may have come across as though I am a mover and don't like to sit down leading to my lack of reading because I can't sit long enough to read. Let me clarify, I LOVE to sit down too! It's the actually reading part. The first couple of pages of a new book are usually pretty good, but then I start getting sleepy or daydreaming about other things and realize I read like 5 pages and do not know what any of them said. Do you know how many times I have read the first half of a book? If you count all the times I have read the first half of a book, then I could consider myself to have read LOTS of books in my life. I may not know how they ended, but I sure have the beginning down pat. I mean by the time I re-read the first half of the book, I am bored with it and ready to move on to something else.

I will say though, now that both of the girls are in school and reading is emphasized so strongly, I do read more. Henry and Mudge and Junie B. Jones are some really good books. I have read several ALL the way through as a matter of fact. How impressive is that?

My interest and desire for reading has increased over the last year or so. My actual reading has not though. But I think about the freedom that comes with reading. It amazes me how much you gain from reading. There are tons of benefits. I mean if you can't read, then the simplest things are either impossible or at the least difficult. Can you imagine getting something in the mail that is supposed to be returned by a certain deadline, but you would not know it if you could not read it. Or writing a check...you could not fill it out if you can't read the line descriptions. My Papa mastered that though. He could not read, but he did figure out what went where and he was a master "copier". Even though he could not write either, he did amazing things with his new typewriter. He typed out everything except the long version of the payment only because that part was not on the bill for him to copy. Without reading, you can't even prepare a meal from a recipe; you can't park in the right spot at the store if you do not know what the reserved spots are for. Basically, you are very dependent if you can't read.

It is a wonderful gift to be able to read. I don't take it for granted. I like reading magazines, they are so ideal for me. Lots of short stories that I can get through quickly and move on. When I think back about books I have read, there are two that come to mind.

The first one is "Misty and Me". This I believe was my first book to ever read all the way through. We were taking the train to Florida to see some family friends and I took this book thinking that the long riding over night may be boring. Boy, was I wrong. Those rats kept us quite entertained. I did manage to read the book completely through though. Interesting fact, I was 11 years old!








I don't know if this is the right book image, but the other book I remember reading completely through was about Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins. I know that sounds weird, but it was a very interesting, yet disturbing book. It for sure kept my interest and I read it in like a couple of days. Another interesting fact is I was 21 year old then. So in my first 21 years, I read 2 books completely. That's pretty sad.








If you are wondering how I managed to get through school without reading, I can't answer that. When it came time for book reports, I usually read the first and last chapters of a book and just hoped I could figure out the gist of it to meet the mandatory length needed to turn in the paper. When it came to oral book reports, well why would I read the book if I was not going to do the oral book report part of it. Nope, I usually took zeros on those types of things. I just worked harder at the rest of my assignments to pull my grade back up. I did have one teacher in 12th grade that had mercy on me because I refused to give an oral report and was determined to just take my zero which would have most likely failed me and I would not have graduated. She allowed me to come in and give my report to her only. Anyway, that had nothing to do with reading… :-)

Back to my love of reading. So I checked out a book at the library last night. Why was I at the library you asked if I do not read? Well, Phoebe had to look up 5 of her spelling words in a dictionary and write the pronunciation and page number…..we did not have a dictionary (except the internet version). While I was looking for a dictionary and kept stumbling upon the encyclopedias, she grabbed a book about the Bermuda Triangle.


She wanted to read it instead of doing her assignment. So when we were done with her assignment, we read it. Of course by the time we got to it, she did not want to read it because it looked boring and I had to sell her own it. She realty enjoyed it and I did too.











I ended up selling myself on it and found me a “grown-up” version. I really hope I do stay interested in it enough to read it. It stinks taking a book back to the library to return it, unread, and pay an overdue fee! I plan to write a book report on it too!