When I was a little girl my biggest desire was to be able to read. This is how I saw my family entertain themselves. Every night I saw my father sit in his big comfy red chenille reading chair in the living room, put his feet up on the ottoman and read the newspaper. What he was doing looked so interesting that I would imitate him. I longed to be able to read. What else was there to do on a rainy day when you couldn't ride your bike and look for adventure?
Dad would be totally engrossed by whatever he read. I saw him read church books and murder mysteries ( Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie were his favorites - he was proud that he had read them all ). I saw Dad read on the adirondack chair on the deck in Vancouver, in the big reading chair in the living room in Vancouver and in any comfy outdoor spot when he was finished with his yard work on Saturdays in Winnipeg.
I had a box of my brother Ken's comic books under my bed and I would read the pictures night after night and long for the time when I could read the words. I didn't go to Kindergarten (I don’t know why - maybe it didn't exist then) but I was so excited to go to my first day of first grade because I thought that I would learn how to read - that day! I came home a disappointed little girl and continued to read my comic book images every night.
Gradually I learned the parts of learning how to read and I would read and read and read. TV was not a distraction then. We had a small TV that was in the basement in Vancouver with no comfy couch in front of it to lure you to stay. There were only three channels and they were all in black and white. When I read, images were in beautiful color. The set and the angles that I viewed each scene were from my own vivid imagination (Imagination is so much better than any movie set.) I could slow the story down or speed it up, reread and savor my favorite parts, and cast the characters to look exactly how I wanted them to look.
Reading became my other world, my escape and my entertainment. I mostly read at night….and I couldn't stop until my eyes shut on their own. My mother would come in and tell me it was time to turn off the light and go to sleep; I’d say “ya mum” but I’d go to the end of a chapter and be consumed with curiosity about what was going to happen next that I disobeyed my mother night after night to read what happened next.
I read by the light of a little yellow and brown metal light that hung on the wall. I would take that light and put it under the covers and keep reading. The bulb was open on the top. One night, as I hid under the covers reading, the bulb touched my blanket and it began to smoke. A scar was burned onto my favorite blanket (my precious baby blanket - but thats a story for another time).
My love of reading was set. I started out reading the Bobbsey twins series , then advanced to Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Anne of Green Gables series and then to Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie as I grew older.
I love to read and study the scriptures - two very different things. The stories come alive in my imagination and again I can slow the story down and think about what I read, speed it up or even put myself into the scene.
Just as I did as a five year old, I still love to curl up with a good book. The best places that I have read are : in a hammock under the blossoming orange trees in Escondido, in front of a fire on a wintry night in many places we have lived, in the BYUI bookstore in a leather armchair with a pile of interesting books beside me to look through, on the sun porch in GA looking out onto the dogwoods blooming in spring, in bed with a cozy feather comforter in the Citizen M hotel near the airport in Amsterdam, and of course in my own comfy bed any night anywhere.
I heart reading!
Here are a few of my favorites quotes about reading.
“home is where my books are.”
“A library is infinity under a roof.”
“ I do not want to just read books; I want to climb inside them and live there.”
(except for the hunger games)
“A room without books is like a body without a soul” Cicero
“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness has obviously never been inside a bookstore.”
“Its strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”
“There is no such thing as too many books.”
Book hangover:
Inability to start a new book because you’re living in the last book’s world.”
(I just read Edenbrooke. Totally fits this)
“When I finish a book, I mope around for awhile because I feel a hole in my heart.
When I finish a series, it’s even worse.”
“I’m a couple books away from being on an episode of hoarders.”
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from
almost all the miseries of life.” W Somerset Maugham
“I am not difficult to buy for.
Go to a bookstore.”
Buy a book.”
“Magic begins when you open a book.”
(me)
“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
“I like big books and I cannot lie. “
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