Lately, I have been thinking about reading: what we read, why we read, how we respond to what we read, how/whether our world is shaped by what we read.
I grew up very poor ... we had a flush toilet but it was outside and three houses shared it. We had no television until I was 12 and no telephone until I was about 18. My first language was Spanish as was my mother's (first and mostly only language). She dropped out of 3rd grade when she was still in Mexico. My father went all the way to 8th grade and he as very proud of that. My parents had good brains but did not value learning, so ours was not an educated household and reading was pretty much non existent. (Much later, my favorite memory of my mother is when she was 93 and visiting me. I came home to find her on the couch reading Hilary Clinton's autobiography, the Spanish-English dictionary on one side, her cane and Webster's on the other. She too had discovered reading!).
I still remember the thrill of reading my first book ... not just looking at the pictures or remembering or making up what the pages were supposed to say, but actually seeing the letters, putting them together into words, stringing the words into sentences and then making sense of the whole thing -- the picture expended by the sentences and the pages connected to make a story. It was the most thrilling experience of my life.
I became an avid reader but our house had very little in the way of reading material, no newspapers or books, the few books (the Bible and hymnals) were in Spanish; moreover, at 7 years old, I had not yet learned about the public library. So I read whatever I could find ... labels on cans, on boxes, the little care instructions on items from the store, signs on the walls of places we happened to pass. My father's boss gave him an old set of Compton's picture encyclopedias for children and an old dictionary ... so I read the encyclopedia and the dictionary. I had a great vocabulary for an 8 year old, too bad that I could not read the diacritical markings and could not pronounce them (I still have trouble with the spoken words).
When I discovered the library, I went crazy -- reading at least a book a day, sometimes more when the moon was full and I could get to the window and read by the moonlight. When I got my textbooks at the beginning of the school year, I would read them from cover to cover, and then re-read as assigned during the year.
I read and had no life outside of my assigned chores and my imagination ... I had no friends and mostly escaped my family by reading (since I was the identified victim and life was dreary and often emotionally numbing). I hid in the tree in our backyard to read and escape from the reality of my life. In my imagination, I flew to wonderful exotic places where there was no strife, where I was loved and a vital part of the scene, where I was witty and respected and understood. The harder my life became, the more I read.
By the time I was 13, I had read Fanny Hill an erotic novel published around 1750. I have no idea how I got a hold of it, but I read it and knew that I should not tell anyone that I had it. I did not really understand what Fanny was experiencing, but knew it was my naughty secret, and I had so few things that were my own. I also read War and Peace. Again, I understood enough to know that I did not understand but was determined to read every last word ... and so I did.
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