Looking Back at Love and Reading

On the second day of my children’s literature class, I asked students to write about a time when they first loved to read. For some, early reading was connected to the comfort of a mother’s arm around them, or, for one, hearing a story before being folded into a yellow blanket “like a little burrito.” Several wrote about parents taking turns, and their different voices becoming associated with different books. One mentioned her dad sitting between the sisters so they could get a view of the pictures, but also to keep them apart for a few unsquabbling minutes. Another wrote that her mom should “win a Nobel Peace Prize for reading ‘Chicka Chicka Boom Boom’ several hundred times without complaint.”

As someone who would often annoy my daughter by checking the publisher before reading the story, I love the dad who “could even make the inside cover and introductory pages exciting, belting aloud the publisher’s name and signaling us to yell out what city it was from. ‘Harper Collins Publishers…. NEW YORK’ we would all scream.”

Some remembered being intent on cracking a mystery an older sibling knew. One tried to look good by memorizing a Dr. Seuss book, before being gently sent back to sound out the letters. One liked to imitate the way her dad turned the pages of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and “would bend the books back and forth just to listen to the sound, pretending that it was the sound of hundred-year-old paper.”

One considered the existential questions that haunted her while hearing Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit; she tried to understand what was real and figure out how she could possibly love her own stuffed bunny more than she already did. For others reading pleasure came later and on their own – with Greek myths or Harry Potter. One student wrote her ENTIRE paper in the voice of Junie B. Jones, which CRACKED ME UP.

I was touched by the grandmother who stopped by with a book she’d picked up a garage sale or somewhere before hospital visits with her husband; one gift was Black Beauty, which the granddaughter read over and over, finding “that even though the words on the page were the same, and as far as I could tell, I was still the same, somehow I wasn’t reading the same story.” Several called up the mix of pride, frustration, and jealousy of their parents when their children sometimes chose books over company, with one mentioning how she now, as an English major, is a bit jealous, too, of her old self who could get lost in words on a page.