Day 22: Your Early Reading Life

I'm writing Ann Dee Ellis' 8 Minute Memoirs in place of #NaNoWriMo.

So I'm a little out of order. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't remember learning how to read. So far as I can tell, I was born reading. I remember getting to kindergarten and realizing that there were things that I knew that the other kids didn't, like all my letters and a lot of sight words. It shocked me that you had to be taught those kinds of things.

Looking back, this probably has something to do with how long it took me to actually learn how to learn and get good grades, but that's probably for another post.

My early reading life was somewhere in between the average kid and Matilda. I remember being surprised at how much more Matilda had read than I had (geez, that movie came out at the perfect time for me) because trends at the time showed that I read more than most kids my age.

One week I sat in Sunday School nearly dying of what I thought was agony because another kid in my class was such a slow reader. Looking back on that, I wish I had demonstrated better patience with him and other kids I knew who were slower readers. I try to practice that now with my students--I can only imagine how I made a couple of kids feel back in elementary, shouting out the next word at them so they would just get through the reading faster.

I devoured books for so many years. Anything I could get my hands on and that felt geared towards me at all, I would read voraciously. Ramona Quimby was perfectly suited to my tastes for a few years, and my school library carried the full Goosebumps series. I also had a bad habit of reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, especially at night after the lights were turned off. As the Harry Potter books were released, I would often consume them whole within 24 hours of their release. Even the final book (which was a massive tome, as most know) I had shipped to my grandparents' house as it came out while we were on vacation there. It was one of my early solo Amazon purchases.

For a few years I especially loved Roald Dahl. The worlds he built always appealed to me. I thought The Twits was pure genius, James and the Giant Peach was a masterpiece, The Witches was the most frightening thing on paper, and Matilda was written just for me.

Escaping into books is harder at 31 than it was at age 8, but I still love the thrill of finding a book that can sweep me up inside its pages.