I was never much of a reader when I was young. Though my parents encouraged me to read, I never found it interesting enough. I don’t know if school helped or not, since there were no books in my early years that I remember having read that excited me. My parents didn’t read to me and I don’t recall things that were read to me in elementary school.
Each year we had to take standardized tests to determine our reading and math skills. I always scored well on those tests. I would be a year or two above my grade level, so I did know how to read. If anything, the books chosen by some of my teachers for me to read should have discouraged me.
In sixth grade one of the books that our class had to read was the unabridged version of the Three Musketeers. I’m not sure if I ever finished reading the whole thing. I certainly didn’t like it, or understand most of it. In seventh grade it got worse. My teacher had us read both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Again I had little understanding of what I was reading despite my reading comprehension scores on tests.
There are some reading highlights that I do remember from my youth. I found a biography book on David Farragut, who was a famous American Civil war naval hero. I breezed through the book and was craving more, so I decided to try another biography and took a Landmark biography book on Thomas Jefferson. It was too slow for me, so again I lost interest in reading.
While most boys at the time were reading Hardy Boys mysteries and girls were either reading Nancy Drew or The Bobbsey Twins mysteries, I was not. I did try a Hardy Boys book once, but didn’t like it. I believe my sisters had some Bobbsey Twins books, but I didn’t even try them. I did find a series that I did get into. The series was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I read about 3 or 4 of them and really enjoyed them. There were more in the series which I was unable to obtain. I liked the series so much that I tried to mimic some of its writing. Instead of using the characters from the books, I used some of my friends as well as myself as the characters in the stories.
My 8th grade English teacher inspired me both to write and read a little. She read us the story, “The Most Dangerous Game” from a book of stories about action and adventure. She got me to read the book and all of the rest of the stories in it.
I can remember some of the books that I was required to read in high school, like: Heart of the Midlothian by Walter Scott, Moll Flanders by Daniel DeFoe, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As to Shakespeare I remember Hamlet and Macbeth. Even reading those today, I have trouble with the language. None of these readings, and I believe I read most of them, inspired me at all.
It wasn’t until I was in college and someone suggested I read the book Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean, that I finally got hooked on reading. Unlike trying a different book in the same genre, as I had tried with biographies when I was younger, all of MacLean’s books were similar in excitement and action. I continued reading constantly until I had finished all of his books, anxiously waiting each new one he wrote. I followed MacLean’s books with Robert Ludlum’s books.
I finally had to stop reading all these adult novels when I began teaching and then began a long period of reading children’s books. Now as a retired teacher I do occasionally get to read adult books again, however as a professional storyteller, I tend to spend most of my time reading stories in an effort to find ones to tell and I enjoy all of those. I guess I could say that I am now a reader.
