Reading Across the Generations	
Anonymous (2010-03-10)

ANONYMOUS: I've always been a reader.  Some of my earliest memories are of me reading my favorite books, which were mainly fairy tales.  I remember that I had a set of fairy tales and Hansel and Gretel was my absolute favorite, and I think I read at a very early age.  My grandfather used to tell a story about taking me on a doctor's visit one day, and he'd always say, "I always knew you were a smart cookie." And I was at the doctor's office and I walked around the waiting room, reading all the signs that were posted, in some of the other patients there who are waiting asked him, "Well, what grade is she in?  She's so small." And he said, "Well, she's not in any grade yet. She hasn't even gone to school." 

So I don't have a memory of learning to read, I just always remember being around books and enjoying listening to stories, and just really engaging with books, looking at pictures, reading stories, that was always a favorite thing for me to do during my childhood.  My grandfather would say, "Well, I think you got that honestly," because my mom was always known to have her nose in a book as a child.  She spent quite a bit of time reading and was often in trouble because of reading.  Growing up in a family with 11 brothers and sisters meant that there were a lot of household chores, and everyone was expected to complete the things that they had been assigned to do by my grandmother, who ran the household, and she ran a very tight ship.  When chores weren't done--when my mother's chores weren't done, that is--it was often expected that she had squirreled away somewhere in the house with a book and would have to be reprimanded and told to get her chores done.  My grandmother still says, "You know, you'd be a much better cook if you hadn't spent all of your time reading books while you were growing up, and spent a little more time in the kitchen learning the nuances of cooking." So I guess there are always tradeoffs.

But as a child growing up, I think that really influenced my mother's decisions about my own reading, and there were always books available, and I don't recall ever being in trouble because I was reading a book and perhaps not taking care of some other things that I was supposed to do.  I think that was a very conscientious decision on her part to not have me feel the way that perhaps she felt as a child.  So I would say as a child I just loved books, and that continued through my teenage years.  

I think during my teen years I went through a phase where I began to think of myself as an intellectual.  I had this fantasy or this sense about 'real readers' as being people who read just really complex, very tough kinds of books and talked about them perhaps at parties, or--I don't know where I imagined people would be having these conversations.  So I really was very much into reading the kinds of books that I thought intellectuals read.  I spent many summers, several summers, going to various literary camps or sessions that were on college campuses, and took classes, and read very interesting books, lots of global literature, and we talked about them.  We did go out and sit on the quad or under a tree with a young professor, generally, and talk about books.  And I loved it.

I think I was probably a little bit of a book snob during those years, and part of that came from not only my interest in reading, but what I perceived as my mother's complete lack of taste in books. [[Laughs]] She went through a phase where she read all the Harlequin romances that were ever written, I'm sure.  I just had this memory of shopping bags and shopping bags of romance novels around our home, because she just devoured them.  She would read two or three in a night, and then she'd pack them all away in a shopping bag and take them to a resale shop, or she'd take them into work and hand them out to other people.  And I just thought, "I cannot believe that you are reading romance novels." 

Of course, I never would say anything like that to her, but I do remember after reading something that I probably thought was very edgy--it may have been something like Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" or something in that vein.  And I mentioned it to my mother in a term that probably conveyed, "Of course, this is something that you've probably never read." She came back with this very snippy little quip that not only told me that she had read it, but that she had read quite a few things, and that really put me into my place, so to speak.  And I realized, "Wow, she does have a broad sense; she is more than just a Harlequin romance reader.  She does have this broad sense of literature that she's been just sort of hiding away from me." Of course, later I learned that because of my mother's work, she did a lot of technical reading and writing contracts and things like that, she said because of the heavy reading that her job required, when she came home, she really didn't want to engage in a book that might be any more than just a light kind of escape.

Of course, I've grown as a reader.  I still read a lot today.  As a graduate student, I don't eat read as many things for pleasure as I'd like, but I try to find time to fit that into my day.  I can now relate to some of the things my mother was saying about some light escapism, because I find that I reach for those things, too, after reading through, again and again and again, some very complex, abstract ideas that I'm finding in some of my graduate reading.  So I can certainly relate to her preference of reading as escapism.

As a mom, I also have been, over the last 18 years, helping my children to love books and to be readers.  That's something that's really been important to me.  My husband is a reader, and so our home is filled with books, our children read a lot, we try to point them to things that we think they would enjoy.  And we've always been very, I guess, liberal in what we would allow them to read.  We didn't, and still don't, censor very many things.  I think books provide a way for us to talk about some things that we probably would not discuss, or it might be a little more difficult to discuss.  We've always just let them read whatever they've wanted.  

My son as a child, a young child, was very much into fantasy, and a lot of the things that were happening in the things that we were reading--there was a lot of violence.  And so we were certainly concerned about that, but he just loved it.  And he eventually moved on and started to read some other things, but we just said, "Well, we're just supporting what he wants to read right now." And we tried to find things that are somewhat age appropriate, but fantasy...  At that time, there was not a lot written for young children.  That was sort of the pre-Harry Potter phase, and with our other children it's been very similar.  We just give them the things that we think they will love, and hope that reading will become something that they enjoy and continue to pursue, even into their adulthood, and we've certainly shared that with our family and with our children.  So in that sense, there is this very strong sort of reading lineage in our family, this gift that we sort of passed along and nurtured and supported, and we hope to foster across the generations.