Destined or Doomed? Readers by Design

Our parents may have lead us to water, but they definitely didn't make us drink.

Ann:

My mom tells me that we read together all the time when I was little. And I do have a visceral nostalgia for the shoestring spaghetti of Gregory the Terrible Eater, the pendulous night fruit discovered by Stellaluna, the nine-pie picnic courtesy of Harold and his crayon (sensing a pattern yet?). I don't, however, have any memories of snuggling next to her, feeling the characters and pages with grubby little fingers, or sounding out simple words like CAT DOG BOOK. I just remember the stories. It wasn't until much later that any real connection was made between those stories and the act of reading itself.

Second grade brought individual reading time: Choose a book from your designated crate (reading levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and find a solitary place to hide away with it--two girls claim the small, yellow sofa, one boy retreats behind the math easel, a handful of students crawl under their desks and lay on their bellies.

This is my first memory of reading. The freedom of choice! The prestige of the higher level (literally) stacked crate! The illicit thrill of leaving our little school desk prisons! For the first time, reading was an experience almost as satisfying as the story.

Though I've long forgotten the plot of Dragonling and I've certainly outgrown the humor of Space Brat 3: the Wrath of Squat, I'll never quite forget the flimsy, unremarkable paperback doors that lead me into the world of reading.

Jan:

I was always destined to be the reader out of my siblings (or doomed--I did get grounded from reading in high school because I would read all night instead of doing my homework...).  I was the one who, after my mom finished a bedtime story, would bounce up and down saying "Again! Again!"  Some of the family favorites were The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series.  I also loved Shel Silverstein and the Hardy Boys.  All pretty standard fair for a kid, except maybe the Stinky Cheese book, though I have since found other people who grew up loving it too.

There is one book, though, that was my gateway drug.  I found the book in the school library in probably 4th grade.  It was a fantasy novel that seemed wonderfully mature to be in an elementary school library (I'm pretty sure it was hot pink on the AR color scale).  I loved this book and basically converted to the fantasy genre then and there.  Worst part is, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called or who it was by.  Google doesn't know either based on the disjointed, 15-year-old descriptors that I've been able to give it.  So not only did this book make me a fantasy devotee, it also made me a serial book owner because I am petrified of being haunted by another book the way this book haunts me still. So I buy any book I want to read, and I don't get rid of them afterwards (unless they were just terrible).  Trust me, resale book stores are my wallet's best friend.

Just in case anyone magically has read this book and knows what it is, I'm going to list everything I remember about it.  It's a silly notion, but I have to hope against hope that one day someone will relieve my brain of this nagging burden.

• The main character is female and is one of many slaves whose job it is to work in the mines.  Slaves are branded with a mark on their foreheads, but she moved when receiving hers, so it is smudged.
• She escapes from the mines and hides the fact that she is a slave and ends up journeying with a (free) man, or perhaps two of them.
• There is a scene where she and her companions stop for the night in a cave, and she sleeps by the fire, naked, between animal furs, while near her male companion(s).  That scene was so captivating to me at the time.  It seemed taboo and sensual, yet liberating.  I might have been reading waaay too much into it.
• Later in the book, she ends up in the religious center of their world.  She goes into the temple with the continuously burning flame, which is only open to the high priest once a year.

And that's all I remember.  I remember so little of a book that made such a huge impression on me.  It is torment, I swear.

Diane:

It's hard to know where to start in this throwback post. My parents used to read to me and my sister before bed. We were promised one chapter each night, and I remember the two of us always begging for another because we lived in a "two-story" house. We were read adventure books primarily, children's condensed classics like Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Tom Sawyer. The series I remember the best is Frank Peretti's Cooper Kids Adventure series. I read on my own, of course, and often I would reread our story time books.

I do have one distinct memory of a literary awakening. I was about 11 or 12 years old and I discovered a box of books in the garage. I uncovered The Covenant by Hilda Stahl--a Christian romance novelist. I was hooked. I read and reread it several times, falling in love with the story of 16-year-old Jennet who gets sold by her family into indentured servitude around the time of the Civil War and must escape by marrying a man she hardly knows. Anyway, I'm not sure if the writing would hold up for me today, but the story was captivating, if a bit melodramatic. Ultimately, I think it did pave the way for me to enjoy loftier novels.