Girl, Pick Up a Book

When I was young, I was a voracious reader. I would bring home stacks upon stacks of books from the library, and with a two-week turnaround time on my borrowed books, you'd never think I'd make it through them all. But I did. My room was one of my favorite reading spots because, with three brothers, it was one of the few quiet places I had to go; however, I often dragged myself out of my room to read somewhere else in the house because my mom demanded that I come "be social" with the family... so I would read at the kitchen table or in the living room. Like all good book worms, I read at night by lamplight, quickly dousing the light and pretending to be asleep when I heard my dad's footsteps coming down the stairs, only to turn the light back on when the creaking steps told me he was on his way back up.

College came and with it came more studying and less reading for fun. I managed to fit some "great text" classes into my schedule (think, Dante's Inferno and similar texts, taught by a man in a suit who named his son Francis), far outpacing the class full of engineering students (it was a requirement for them for their "well-rounded education" much like basic math classes were a requirement for my professional writing major).

A couple of years later and I was a teacher myself, trying to light little literature fires in the hearts of my middle school language arts students. At that point I was reading mostly essays, research papers, spelling tests, and YA novels so I could appropriately stock my classroom library.

I am now a happy homemaker and stay-at-home mom to two little boys. Most of my reading is either Where Do Steam Trains Sleep at Night? or some form of non-fiction book on child development, education, how to be a good mom, or gardening. The worst part is, I almost never finish a book. I still have stacks and stacks of books on my nightstand, but they are waiting to be read, waiting to be finished, mostly just getting knocked over. I'm a serial book starter. I want the information these books contain, but I can never seem to make it to the end. I get bored, distracted, or I have a lapse in reading so long that I have to start the book over because I've completely forgotten what the whole thing was about in the first place.

To help encourage, or re-ignite, my love of reading, my mom and I started a yearly reading challenge. The premise is simple: whoever reads the most books in a year, wins. The loser buys lunch and dessert at The Cheesecake Factory. Sadly, I hardly ever make it into double digits. I did win this year, with 12 books, which shocked me and saddened me, to be honest. 12 books in a year? One book in a whole month? I realize that I have more responsibilities now than I did years ago, but I also realized that I've lost the love and joy I used to have for reading. Reading simply wasn't fun anymore.

So I challenged myself to bring fiction back into my life. After I became a mom, my thought was "I don't have time to read fiction. There's too much information I need to consume to make sure I'm doing everything the best I possibly can." Can you see why all the fun got sucked out of reading? What a drag that mentality is.

I went down into my basement and cracked open a box of old books to see if anything caught my eye. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I'd always wanted to read it but never got around to it. So it came upstairs with me and I hardly put it down afterward. I read it while I made soup for dinner, while my kids were in the bath, while I waited in line at the grocery store. Here, finally, was my love of reading. Here was a beautifully crafted story with depth and language far superior to any informational text or beach read. It's difficult for me to say that a book centered around the atrocities of WWII was a breath of fresh air, but for me it was. I laughed, I cried, I got lost in the world of the story, and I found the joy I had forgotten.

I'm still trying to overcome the belief that I should only be reading books that are good for my personal development. The number of unread books I have in that category seems endless. After all, I have a finite amount of time on this earth and shouldn't I be doing the most with it? But what if the reading for pleasure, the true enjoyment I get from it, is doing the most with the time I have? I'm not instilling a love of books into my children by dragging myself through yet another parenting book. I grow their love of reading by showing them mine.

Current read: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, which is also excellent.