"...you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda' picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library."
-- Will Hunting
If I have had a lifelong love affair with anything it's been with books. I can remember being delighted and enthralled by them from the very first moment I read 'Go Dog Go' or 'Are You My Mother?'. They have educated me, soothed me and saved my life. I grew up in an atmosphere under which I found it impossible to concentrate on school. For me, school inescapably consumed by social minutia that largely paled in comparison to the non-stop crises that was my home-life. I rarely felt like I was learning anything anyway, and I loved learning. I used to routinely read the ancient set of Encyclopedia Britannica's that we had owned since approximately the year of my birth. But I remember being drawn to them from a very early age. I learned to research and cross-reference In them. I think of it as my 'Log Cabin' education. I learned as Abraham Lincoln learned, as he didn't do so badly.
There isn't much that I haven't learned from, or believe I could learn from books. Reading is my preferred medium for absorbing anything. At any period of great stress, at periods where I have felt the most lost, I instinctively head to a bookstore, where I will literally wander around waiting for an answer for my distress to fall from the shelves. I have healed myself with words my whole life. I have found heroes and reasons to live in books. They have been my best companions. And aside from that, I collected them, built a library that for every book I could see 10 more came to mind that I wished were on my shelves. My ultimate house has those great ceiling to floor built-ins covering the walls. Hell, my ultimate, ultimate house has it's own two-story library with metal spiral staircase and OED on it's own stand, large work table with atlas open and desk, etc.
I have dragged a rather large library overseas and cross country a great many expensive times and my books were always the first thing I unpacked. And then I had my kids, which seriously cut into my reading time, and subsequently during an unstable time we moved approx 5 times in a two year period. At the end of that time, even though I felt I could finally relax just about, I gave up the books, just in case I was wrong. I could take the trauma or the exhaustion of packing and unpacking them any more. The kids were all things by then anyway. So now they live, in many labeled boxes, against the wall of the garage.
So you'd think someone like this would have been reading to her kids since they were in the womb, right? Yeah, I thought so too. But that's not how it worked out. I think, that by the time I got a spare moment returned to me after several years of very intense parenting, I was just so greedy to get back to my own reading. Most everyone else in the family has read stories to the kids, but rarely me. And I still can't bring myself to do it. They have homework requirements of nightly reading, but will they be lifelong readers? I don't know but it looks like some of them will. Is that what determines it? I don't remember anyone in my immediate family that was a regular reader, but I adored books. What makes a reader?
In my case, I hope that it will be the fact that they have seen their parent with a book in her hand every day of their lives. And who knows, maybe I'll read to them tonight...