031 Reader

Confessions of a Book Reader

I have a lifetime of reading memories and thought I would share a few!

My parents were great readers and were in despair about their daughter who refused to learn to read. I thought my logic was sound—why go to the effort when both parents and my older sister were available to read to me?

We were living at the time on the naval base at Port Heuneme (pronounced why-a-name-e), California. So my parents consulted the base librarian and she recommended Dr. Seuss.

I started with If I Ran the Zoo, quickly followed by Horton Hears a Who. Soon there were complaints from the base authorities that I stopped on the way home from the base library and sat on the curb to read my books.

From that I progressed to reading everything in the house—cereal boxes, magazines, newspapers, my books, my sister’s books, my parents’ books. I heard, “Turn off the light and go to bed!” many nights until I discovered the flashlight under the covers!

When I was in the seventh and eighth grade, I decided I needed to read the great masters. I remember trying Russian novels such as War and Peace, but could not get through them. 

But somehow, I did manage to read the six volumes of the Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, the Prairie Years and Lincoln, the War Years. Then I went through my French novelist phase, reading Dumas and Hugo. I loved Jean Valjean long before Les Mis!

I also remember reading Camus and Sartre at this time. My sister was senior in high school and I read all her supplemental readings. I am not sure I understood The Stranger but I finished it anyway.

When I lived in South Carolina, the local NPR station featured narrated books with a segment of a book read each day. That was my first introduction to audio-books. When I moved to Philadelphia and had a long commute to work, I listened to a lot of books. To keep up with my habit, I began reviewing audio-books for Library Journal and for Audio-File Magazine. 

I received a lot of free audio-books, including some real dogs. I also discovered some books don’t translate to audio format. I had loved The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was in my Victor Hugo phase. On my earlier reading, I must have skipped all the pages that described the architecture of Paris. Since I have not been to Paris, listening to descriptions of building after building and block after block through an audio-tape was excruciating. 

Searching for more audio-books in the library introduced me to authors I might have never read, including Dick Francis, Nevada Barr, Sara Paretsky, Carl Hiaasen, and James Lee Burke. I loved to hear the narrator of Burke’s mysteries say the detective’s name—Robicheaux. 

Of course, now I download my audio-books from the library. Perhaps in a future posting I can talk about downloading printed books.

When I was a kid, I read book after book, always persevering to the end. Now, I find the book has to grab me right away or it goes back to the library unread. I am probably missing some good books, but I don’t seem to have as much time for reading.

Trish