If there is a reader in my life who taught me to relish the written word and my time immersed inside a book, that person is my mother.
An avid reader herself, my mother spent a large part of my childhood reading books that she would then set in front of me so that I could love them, too. Somehow, my mother always had an uncanny knack for figuring out what sorts of books I liked and procuring more of them.
This was especially pronounced in my early childhood, when my mother and father would both pick out books for me at the library, and I found that I often gravitated more towards those chosen by my mother.
I learned to read using a kit called Hooked-on-Phonix that my parents gave me the summer we spent at my grandparents’ house before we moved to Japan. That Christmas, right before we moved, my mother gave me Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. With my father busy in his new job and my mother was busy looking after my new sisters, being read to became a luxury. So I learned to read to myself, and I learned quickly.
At first, being in Japan meant that access to new English books was rare. It was years before we borrowed the subsequent books in the Little House series from someone and I could finish reading them. By that time, I had somewhat passed the target age group and was finding myself less drawn into the stories.
Eventually, we discovered that the American School, which was in reasonable biking distance, had elementary school, middle school and high school libraries that we could access. For the eight years that we lived in Japan, the American elementary school library became my primary source of books.
I began frequenting this library on my own when I became addicted to the Nancy Drew series though we only had three volumes at home (courtesy of my mother, of course). I then discovered that many of the books were available at the American School. The librarian used to call me the Nancy Drew Girl, long after I’d read all volumes by the original author and determined that I didn’t enjoy those parts of the series written by (an)other author(s), and therefore was no longer reading Nancy Drew.
My mother also introduced me to Harry Potter when I was perhaps five or six years old. She was waxing poetic, so I read the first chapter and a half or so. I was unimpressed and didn’t pick it up again until I was nearly or had just turned seven. At that point I devoured it with an obsessive enthusiasm, joining the ranks of children who secretly waited in vain for their Hogwarts letter all through their eleventh summer.
(Side note: I still don’t like the formula used in the first chapter of a few Harry Potter books, including the first. Namely, the formula where the first chapter is full of characters which the reader either never really knows or will come to know later, only there to set a scene and atmosphere. Reading such chapters, there is generally a certain lack of engagement that I feel, woven into the writing because the author is implicitly letting you know that this is not your main character. Now that I know and can usually identify this formula very quickly, I breeze through these chapters, entirely disengaged, just waiting for the next chapter to begin. While I understand the appeal of this formula and even use it on occasion in my own work, I find that for me, it’s a formula that’s a lot more fun to write than it is to read. Which is why, to date, I’ve ended up cutting every use of it out of my own work after writing it.)
The only time that my mother and I had a serious disagreement about a book was over Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens. I was eleven or twelve years old, and my mother decided that it was time for me to graduate from the fantasy novels I was devouring and turn to more serious books. Some of the books she gave me at this time were well worth reading (Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver, for example). But one that I didn’t understand―and still don’t understand, in the context of my age at the time―was Bleakhouse.
I suffered through the entire first chapter (which, fifteen years later, I still summarize as “it was stormy and windy”). When we reached the second chapter and the prose was still meandering on the subject of a senseless family feud and how very senseless it is, I put my foot down.
“What’s the point of any of this?” I demanded. “Is there even a story?”
The answer was yes, but the book took so long to get to it that by that point I was utterly disinterested in it. My mother gave up and never suggested another Charles Dickens book to me―in fact, that became the last book she ever told me to read. After that, her recommendations were conveyed to me as recommendations rather than as orders.