If you're on Twitter, you may have noticed #whyIread trending today. Folks are tweeting all kinds of awesome answers, and though I posted my own, I thought I'd expand on it a bit in a blog post.
I'm not sure how old I was when I learned to read - my mother says I was 4, but of course I can't remember it. Reading and writing have always been inextricably linked in my mind, and the first story I wrote at age 6 - a twelve-page "novel" featuring an orphan who lived in the wilderness with a herd of wild horses - bore some strong similarities to Walter Farley's Black Stallion series, my favorite at the time. When I moved on to the Redwall books in 4th grade, I began a sprawling animal war story epic that topped out at 90,000 words.
Like many creative inwardly-focused kids out there, I was not highly social during my K-12 years. Books were more reliable friends, especially when I was very young; I carried a book out to recess every day starting in second grade. I've always been a fast reader, and as a result I re-read favorite books until I know them practically by heart. When my family took a three-month trip to France, I was a ten-year-old who spoke mainly English. I did befriend some local kids, but I also worked my way through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, secondhand paperback copies that are now so tattered that the bindings no longer hold.
I read widely, but my favorites as a kid were always fantasy or adventure novels. Half Magic, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Tamora Pierce, Philip Pullman - I'll never forget the day I finished reading The Amber Spyglass. It had so captured me that I spent the next two hours wandering the house in a daze, my mind still with Lyra and Will. That daze - that feeling that perhaps the world of the book is more real than the world I'm in, even for a few hours - is why I read.
5 comments:
Very nice post, and wow, you wrote 90k in 4th grade?? That's awesome!
Thanks! Yeah, I wrote the 90K over the course of about a year - started it partway through fourth grade. I had a lot of time on my hands!
Wow, I was never as prolific as you--I rarely wrote more than 5K at a time, and even then, I was definitely a lot older. (Although I distinctly remember my story projects in 4th and 5th grade--the former was called "The Golden Hinde" and based heavily on said creature from "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys", and the latter was basically an Animorphs fan fiction with myself as the main character.)
That's incredible, though. You were cutting at the competition EARLY!
Me? I was always GOOD at reading, but I never really got interested until riiiight before 4th grade--I started reading The Animorphs, and after that, I was totally hooked on books. Nix, Wrede, JUNIPER, MG historical fiction, blanket fantasy--I was all over it.
And I'm glad. :)
The first book I ever loved was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I often imagined getting lost in another world in my closet...when I reread it as an adult though it lost all its magic. :(
Shayda - ooh, Nix and Wrede are two major favorites of mine.
Demitria - oh, that's a shame! Now that I'm older, I do notice some of the flaws in the Narnia books - the casual sexism and treatment of Susan, for example - but my initial love of the books is still so fresh in my mind (I also avoid re-reading "The Last Battle").
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