Did you like to read when you were a child? What were your favorite genres, books or series? Did you read books because of the author or because of the title/plot? Did you own many books? Did your school distribute the Scholastic book orders (or some other type)? Did you visit the library often? Was there a summer reading program when you were young, and did you participate? Do you have any particular memories of your school libraries? What were your favorites and least favorites among the classics (the ones high school English teachers assign!)? If you didn't like reading, do you like it more today than you did then?
I loved reading as a child, and I received this wonderful gift from both of my parents. I read everything I could get my hands on; it got to be fairly difficult finding new books at the little library we used because I had read so many of them already. There were authors that I really enjoyed, but I would also read things just because the title piqued my curiosity. Some of my favorites were The Black Stallion, White Fang, The Borrowers, and Watership Down.
I did not own many books, I guess, because I read too voraciously. What's the point of buying a child a book when she'll have it read by tomorrow and need another one? I would have bankrupted my parents! I did buy some via Scholastic Books, and I actually still have some of those.
There was a summer reading program at the local libraries, but I read too much to keep track of it all. Also, I have a lazy streak, and I just couldn't get my act together enough to write down the books I read.
In elementary school, our library was just a room in the high school building. I remember that it was scary having to return an overdue book because you had to walk through all of those big people! When it was my turn for high school, our school had grown enough to be able to afford a library building, and it was very nice. Unfortunately, I was too old for library classes then, but I did enjoy spending my study hall time there.
I did not enjoy most of the classics we had to read in high school. Honestly (and my mother agrees with me), it felt like they picked books out in order to make us not like to read anymore. During high school, I did not read much, and I really think this is why. The worst was Adam Bede. Ugh! As one of my friends pointed out, the author uses fifty pages to describe the walk to church. Ugh!! And the language was so obscure that one of the main characters got pregnant, had a baby, and killed it, and I totally missed all of that. (Of course, my naivete probably helped some, too.)
So, yes, I did enjoy reading as a child, and I still do!
To join the fun, head over here!
2 comments:
There was one class my junior where I learned how to annotate. That teacher took a different perspective on the classics and divided up our list where we read about twenty of them and then watched historical films on the rest and he compared and contrasted what was in print versus the film story. It made it a little more bearable on things like Grapes of Wrath...
- MJ
www.CreativeMadnessMama.com
My kids have both commented that teachers take the fun out of learning, and my boy was much more of a bookworm until he had to analyze books so much. Such a shame.
Post a Comment